


April Brought a Kind of Madness

by nonphenomenaut



Series: Trapped in Massachusetts [1]
Category: LOVECRAFT H. P. - Works, The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Animal Death, Body Horror, Burgeoning Romance, Case Fic, F/M, First Kiss, Hurt Fox Mulder, Hurt/Comfort, Madness, Minor Character Death, Skinny Dipping, The Colour Out of Space spoilers, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Whump, everything is fact except the stuff that's not, i bent the rules of photography a bit, jane eyre spoilers, just go with it, they say each other's names entirely too much, with finagled plot points
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-13
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:35:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 31,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26449405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonphenomenaut/pseuds/nonphenomenaut
Summary: Mulder and Scully travel to Massachusetts, where something sinister has fallen in the western woods and it's not doing the locals or our Agents any favors.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Series: Trapped in Massachusetts [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2023522
Comments: 33
Kudos: 33





	1. Chapter 1

<< https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXyda5iiGEo >> The Colour Out of Space audiobook read by Wayne June

"The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind" - H.P. Lovecraft

\--  
\--

CHAPTER ONE

The tone inside the G-car changes from a whine to a grind as the tires cross the divide from asphalt to dirt. They're entering into another world and he glances over to see if the shift in vibration has affected her at all.

She looks as peaceful as a bog body over there, curled up asleep with her shoes kicked off. Under the swath of her purple trench she's still buckled in. 

It's still hard for him to shake the awe at how easily she trusts him and he eases his foot off the gas a bit to lessen their jostle on the crunchy country road. 

He trusts her too, he knows. 

He's known it since that very first day when she had the bad luck to come knocking on his dungeon door and when he'd invited her into his spooky little world, it was refreshing to find she hadn't run away screaming or even more surprising - seeking immediate transfer. 

He knows he loves her too.

And that one of these days he's going to tell her, he threatens to think. 

\-----

The seatbelt sign bings off above them as they hit cruising altitude and he doesn't waste a second unfolding his and her tray tables from their full and upright positions. From the depths beneath his seat a folder comes into the fray.

"Scully, it's me."

Fox Mulder had called her earlier that day, breathless and bossy, instructing her to pack immediately for an excursion into the New England backwoods where it was pointedly recommended that she 'leave the heels at home'. Their tickets were already booked for Boston and he'd meet her at Dulles in a half hour. 

"Last one there has to sit in the aisle."

From the passing drinks cart they request a Coke with extra ice for Mulder and a plain ol' water for Scully before she's passing over her complimentary packet of peanuts for the folder and (by his estimate) a particularly interesting Polaroid picture paper clipped to the outside.

He can't help but smirk at the idea that Scully's paying literal peanuts for a glimpse into the secrets of the universe.

"Feast your eyes, Scully." He says giddily, obliging to click on the tiny overhead light. 

She slides her glasses on. 

The photo is of a pockmarked rock placed in the jaws of a folding ruler. Its exterior surface is burnished smooth, save for some glancing edges. Her instincts tell her that the rock has been melted at some point and then re-solidified, based on the somewhat droopy structure of the thing. The possibility of it being metamorphic wanes in her mind.

To add to the mystery, something also appears to be wrong with the film. It has a strange, not-quite-rainbow tint to it, as though when the photo had been developing the chemicals had mixed incorrectly or been subject to extreme temperature swings. Whatever the cause, it had clearly been corrupted in some undefinable way. 

"On what Mulder?" She glances up at him expectantly and he leans in even though he doesn't have to.

The touch of his shoulder is solid ground at 35,000 feet.

"Out of the fifty tons of space debris that strafe our atmosphere every single day, only a small fraction of a small percent are able to make it through without burning up into dust when they hit the mesosphere, which means that with the meteors that do manage to make it through, they're facing the kind of vaporization that can take an object the size of a VW bug and whittle it down to one the size of a microwave.

"So now imagine you're a farmer, Scully" he goes on, talking low but fast, "living your little farmer life out in the woods, when BAM!" He claps suddenly, oblivious to the few distressed murmurs from the startled passengers around them, "a meteorite that's reported by multiple eyewitnesses to be around an astounding seven feet wide drops right into your front yard. What do you do?"

She thinks about it logically, excluding the county fair entries and the 1st place blue ribbons he had initially envisioned when he'd received the letter. "Take it to town? Get it analyzed."

He's genuinely pleased. "Sounds like they must be teaching something right in science school, because that's exactly what the three professors who were called out from Arkham's Miskatonic University did and do you know what they found when they took this piece of it back to the lab?"

Her eyebrows raise in genuine curiosity.

"They found that it behaved unlike any other meteorite on record. Usually meteorites are made up of an iron-nickel alloy with significant traces of cobalt and phosphorus. This one? Tested completely negative on any chemical analysis they performed."

Mulder witnesses the exact his partner's brain clicks over to skepticism. 

Dana Scully understood that any scientist, when presented with a geologic oddity, would have first conducted a qualitative inorganic analysis on the sample by applying it to a concentrated flame, thereby being able to use the resulting color of the burning elements to identify its chemical makeup. The idea that it produced nothing whatsoever was highly suspicious.

"It occluded no distinguishing oxide at all?" she repeats, making sure she heard him correctly.

"Not a single one." He affirms.

"Mulder. That implies that this meteorite is made of no known element on Earth."

He's shaking the entire packet of peanuts straight into his open mouth and the eyebrows sliding up on his forehead are enough to substantiate her conclusion.

Scully huffs in outright disbelief. That's impossible.

Surely the folder will provide her with more. 

Inside she finds a newspaper clipping from The Arkham Gazette with the headline 'FALLING METEOR FOUND IN THE WEST COUNTRY' accompanied by a black and white picture of a man, a woman, and three young boys all standing in a row above a huge crater.

The man, according to the article, was one Mr. Nahum Gardner, who could be seen standing with one hand around the barrel of a rifle and the other around the shoulder of his wife. A proud smile splitting his face. 

His wife, on the other hand, was peering down at the large crater of ripped earth before her feet and appeared unwilling to take her eyes off the incursion even long enough for the photograph. Then there were the boys, sorted in height from tallest to smallest, proudly brandishing their own set of firearms and a triplicate set of smiles that bore three striking resemblances to their father's.

Digging deeper, Scully comes across three sets of notes written by the independent hands of the professors who had been called out to the crash site and finds that not only do they corroborate the fantastic data Mulder has been telling her about but also serves to further confound the mystery.

Their findings are so perplexing, in fact, that she needs to read them aloud, "Mulder, look at this. Their analyses claim that the specimen remained completely unaffected under the application of all caustic reagents; ammonia, alcohol, ether, carbon disulfide, hydrochloric acid, nitric acid. They even tested it against aqua regia - a combination of the two - but none of them did anything to it. There was no reaction at all."

"Except to cool it slightly," Mulder adds, leading her further down in the notes with one of his long fingers. "And that was only after it had maintained a temperature of several hundred degrees over multiple hours and - get this Scully - it was also found to be magnetic, have the consistency of plastic AND purportedly shrank in size over a period of only two days before it disappeared completely into thin air."

He receives a full-on incredulous stare from her this time, meeting it only with an impassive smirk. 

Secretly, there's an additional reason as to why he took this case in the first place and he's bursting at the seams to tell her, but from the way she had glossed over the photograph and summarily dismissed it, it's clear that she's more interested right now on the finicky little details she can rubik's cube into submission with science.

Which is just as well, because he would much rather they be alone when he tells her what he's seen.

She takes a moment to parse it all up in her mind, going over what's been presented one more time before reaching her own final conclusion. Closing the folder. Ultimately resigned. "It sounds to me Mulder; like this is nothing more than a case of Occam's razor."

"Oo. Is that like Gillette? The best a man can get?" He teases.

"It means," she continues, taking it seriously, "that the simplest explanation is usually the right one; that these so-called 'professors' that are purporting to have found evidence of something that defies the very laws of physics as well as the periodic table as we know it - are most likely going to extraordinary lengths just to pull your leg."

She had that tic in her left eye that happened when she was making an earnest point.

And it amused him the way she defended him. His faithful little Scully. Ready and willing to clobber his postulations of the unexplained, but mad as a rabid dog should anyone else decide to take advantage of him. He imagines he can see her aura bristling.

She looks at him flatly to combat his staring. "Mulder. At least confirm for me that I don't have to tell you that rocks don't shrink." Her voice drops low when someone clears their throat behind them.

"Not usually without applying a millennia of weather erosion, sure." Mulder capitulates at regular volume, "but an unknown meteorite from unknown space? Made of elements not found on this planet? C'mon Scully. Is it so impossible to consider that it may be Earth's atmosphere itself that could be toxic? And therefore somehow causes erosion at a far more rapid scale?"

She supposes given a scenario like that it's not completely outside the realms of possibility. "There is the degradation of iron into rust by oxidization or the leaching of calcium from limestone caused by the acids in rainwater, but Mulder, these are still only precursors to erosion, making the material susceptible is not the same as degrading it completely out of existence. And certainly not in such a short span of time."

"Well then I guess it's a good thing I didn't take the professors' words as gospel and got myself a pen pal instead - our host with the most by the name of Ammi Pierce - who just so happens to have accompanied the scientists to the crash site on that fateful day and can give us his own independent eye-witness account of what might be going on. If it's all a big joke Scully, then this guy's clearly been left out of the loop." 

From somewhere behind him, as though holding them off for greater effect, Mulder pulls out a clip of letters and passes them over like his own Prestige. It's a tete-a-tete of hand-written papers. A back and forth of soft, imploring cursive that's written in request of Mulder's assistance and then the formal acquiesce in Mulder's spiky scrawl.

In the final letter, one of gratitude at the FBI's willingness to come, Scully reads that in the four months that have passed since the meteorite had fallen 'strange days' have been afflicting the Gardner homestead as a result. And that any sort of description to possibly explain what was going on would give the actual events no justice. 

They must be seen to be believed. 

"Alright." She says, taking a deep breath. "Benefit of the doubt..."

She is after all a Federal agent and is first and foremost committed to giving this investigation her due diligence no matter the outcome, even if it's at the very least to indulge one of Mulder's whims. Because, after all, she was already here, riding through the sky with him at her side so she may as well sally forth. Far too late to turn back now. 

First order of business when they hit the ground: interviews. 

"Say this isn't a joke being perpetrated on you. What's our schedule for when we land? Are we going to split up? Are you going to interview Mr. Pierce while I interview the professors?" It seemed to her the best course of action but Mulder is shaking his head. 

"What?"

"That would have been the game plan Scully, except," and there's a new helping of intrigue in his eyes, "when I called Miskatonic to try and get in touch with the professors, the University told me that all three of them had put in their resignations and moved out of Arkham all on the same day. And apparently none of them were the kind that bothered to leave forwarding addresses either."

She frowns at this. Her glasses reflecting the little cartouche of vast blue sky behind him. "That seems highly suspicious. Is there any indication of blackmail? Foul play?"

He shrugs. "I haven't figured that angle out yet, but I do have some ideas. I guess getting there is the only way we really find out."

The mismatched pieces of this new mystery float in the off-center of her periphery and don't seem to be cohesive at all. "None of this makes any sense."

"Curiouser and curiouser. That's for sure." He agrees cryptically, then turns away to look out the window. Evidently fine with leaving her to come up with her own conclusions.

Scully remains staring at the back of his neck for a little bit, contemplating the blunt line of trimmed hair at the nape of his collar as she tries to reconcile it all. 

Does he really believe that any, if all, of this could be true? 

Of course he does, she reminds herself. He's Fox 'Spooky' Mulder. 

And no matter how many times she thinks he won't surprise her, he turns around and straight up staggers her. And she finds herself ever in awe of that guileless, mulish way he plants his flag way out in the ether no matter how much she insists on solid ground.

But she also knows that he's always been like that.

He's a tall, dark, Federal pariah. Always ready and willing to be on his best bad behavior.

Banished to the basement for his want to look to the stars.

Mulder's never in his life been bound by logic or science or cold hard facts. He's always been willing to strain their confines, to look out beyond them and around their corners and sometimes even to reshape them entirely in his discoveries.

And if she's being truly honest - Scully knows that he's been doing that to her too - has helped her to press out the borders of her life and find new edges to come against. New understandings. New truths about herself and the world around her.

Like the one about how she's been falling in love with him in increments over the years and the humiliating truth of the fact that she can't drum up her courage enough to tell him.

They rely too much on their partnership in work. On their best friendship in life. It's a balancing act that she for one will not be held responsible for upending. Especially if it somehow doesn't work out.

Oh god. What would she do then? She's completely unwilling to contemplate the sheer breadth of what she has to lose.

For the longest time now she's had her line drawn firmly in the sand. Feeling it's best to remain as they are. Status quo. Forever and ever. Amen. 

She reconsiders the Polaroid of the rock and its rotten Technicolor. The impossibility of its revealed secrets.

Could it truly be so extraordinary? 

With Mulder, she knew, everything was impossible. Until proven otherwise.


	2. Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2   
\--

Outside the Taurus windows, the world's a zeotrope of green. Mulder cracks a sunflower seed between his teeth and eases the rental over the washboards, skillfully avoiding a rather large hole.

They are miles away from the concrete geometry of Boston, having taken a left back in Arkham and he's glad to have finally watched that creepy little town blink out of existence in the rearview. 

He'd gotten a bad feeling the moment he'd stepped out of the car, instantly aware of the sense of foreboding that hung low and poisoned the air like soot. His uneasiness had only compounded when he'd had to leave Scully zonked out in the passenger's seat, needing to trust the locks in his place.

There had been no music playing in Potter's general store.

"Hi. Excuse me? I was wondering if you could help me." Mulder throws the bag of seeds and a couple of water bottles on the counter, attempting to tame the local map back against its obstinate folds. "I'm trying to find a resident who lives in the woods west of here and I'm not sure where exactly I'm supposed to be looking. I've just been told that it's a red house. 'Can't miss it.' Got many of those around here?" 

Mulder looks up to finally meet the wet and widely parted protuberant eyes of the cashier. He's an ugly man with a shellac of black hair and a large, piscine under bite. 

"Hello?"

A stagnant wall-eyed stare is all Mulder gets in return.

"Do you live here? Are you familiar with the area?"

Nothing.

"Sir?"

Still nothing.

Maybe he needs a little more information. "The house I'm looking for belongs to an Ammi Pierce, have you maybe heard of him? ...or are you able to direct me to someone who has?"

No reaction at all.

"Sprechen sie Deutsch?"

Mulder shifts on his feet, an uncomfortable feeling skittering up his neck like a rat as he considers his options. He drums his fingers on the counter. Taking a stab in the dark. "How about Nahum Gardner? You heard of him?"

"Strange days." The words grunt out of the cashier suddenly, loudly, like a rupturing valve. Those globulous eyes finally take one slow sticky blink and Mulder imagines he can _hear_ the man's lids slide. "Since the rock come."

But his interest is peaked. Those words. "What do you mean ' _strange days_ '? Sir?"

But unfortunately, the cashier has lapsed back into silence.

Mulder waits just in case, but nods when he realizes that he's met the end of this man's usefulness. He unfolds a five-dollar bill from his wallet. "Alright. Then can you at least point me in a general direction? I'm losing daylight and my wife and I really need to get back on the road." 

He flicks his eyes away to check on Scully and finds her as safe as she was when he left. Something innately adorable in the way her mouth hangs open.

When he turns back the cashier's finger is planted in the middle of a valley in the Arkham Woods, but his eyes have never left Mulder's face. "Strange. Days." He repeats, more slowly. Leaning forward a bit. His gums shiny and wet. 

And though it seems impossible, the man's eyes grow _wider_ as he says these slow words and the tilt of his body reveals tiny rows of pointed teeth. They remind Mulder of the needle spikes used to keep pigeons from roosting at certain spots in D.C. and that comparison makes him dislike the man even more than he already did.

"Thanks for all your help." Mulder lies with an easy smile. "Keep the change."

And it's not until he's pulling out of Clark's Corner that he lets his face crumple into a frown, driving away from Arkham in what he hopes will be forever.

He doesn't like the way the cashier had left a black spot fingerprint on the map when he'd touched it. 

Smutching the place where they were going felt like a very bad omen.

\--

Mulder stops the car and turns off the engine with a sigh, pressing his fingers into his eyes to dispel their tired sting. The negative image of the ever stretching road fades slowly away beneath the pressure. 

He's not at all pleased to be right about his prediction. And especially not so soon.

By now, they have become completely submerged in the old-growth of the New England forest, where the hickories and the beeches and the hophornbeams filter sunlight like an acid trip. Where cell signals fail to penetrate.

A final damp hull disappears through the open slice of window. 

They've reached the end of the line.

He glances over at his sleeping partner and dares to let his eyes linger on her for a while. He has silently been falling in love for a while now with how the sharp blade of her nose sits in perfect contrast to the soft petal of her face and he only half fears he might wake her if he looks for too long, because he also knows how that would be nearly impossible.

He's never met anyone in his life who sleeps as easily and soundly as Scully.

"Wakey wakey eggs and bakey." He tries magnanimously.

But she's out cold.

He's finally able to get a reaction when he taps his fingers against her cheek and is then completely caught off guard when she reaches up and takes hold of his wrist.

Which is still perfectly fine, until she then decides to make a little precious noise of objection while simultaneously _snuggling_ into his palm and the resulting bloom of unclassified warmth that breaks out low in his guts is enough to cause him to internally panic, while his exterior remains placidly calm.

He clears his throat too loudly and startles her awake. 

It takes her only a moment to realize what she's doing and mumbles a quick apology while giving him his hand back. Each of them tactfully avoiding each other's eyes.

They have both become quite the experts at pretending little incidents like these have not been happening for years. And growing in frequency.

"How long was I asleep for?" She evades and yawns, her mouth going wide enough that it makes her jaw click. It felt like ages and ages.

He looks at his watch to bide his time and tries not to think too hard on the way his hand still tingles. "About three hours or so. Must've been tired."

"You should have woken me up sooner."

"Didn't see any reason to until now." He shrugs and drums his thumbs on the steering wheel, willing her to look out the windshield.

It's not until she's midway through a good stretch, with her arms extended before her and her fingers spread, that her eyes suddenly go wide. 

"Oh my God Mulder!" 

In a spitfire flurry she's stomped into her boots and clambering out of the car.

There's a pile of tree trunks heaped up as high as her shoulders, laid down crossways, blocking the road. It seems that every tree in the immediate vicinity that had been tall enough to span the road's width had been chopped down.

She touches the cleaved circles of the various trunks and notes that they've been cut down by hand rather than by chainsaw. The sap is still tacky beneath her fingers and the shaggy fringes of the ax blows bend back on fresh green wood.

Clearly someone had felt the need to build this recently and with _intent_.

Mulder is busy popping the trunk.

"Is this supposed to be some sort of a warning?" She asks, reading the scene. "Could someone be trying to keep us out?"

"Could be." He says, handing over her pack. "Or they could be trying to keep something in. 

"Either way. Looks like we're walking from here."

\--

It has been following them now for more than an hour.

He can tell it's there by the way the bird calls change overhead. How their discordant cries resonate through the copice as the agents intrude, only to fall eerily silent as they pass by. 

It's clearly not the humans the little feathered klaxons are afraid of. 

It's whatever is behind them.

Over and over in his mind, Mulder considers the few predators that prowl New England forests that have been known to attack humans: the cougar, the black bear, the mischievous pukwudgie. And all the various ways they can defend themselves against them.

He leaves the thumb snap on his holster undone.

Fast coming to regret his idea.

"You gotta think of it as a shortcut Scully." 

He had called her back to show her the deer trail that had appeared providentially beside them, surprised and excited by the way it arrowed off into the very direction they were meant to be headed.

'Toward the fingerprint' he didn't dare say.

But it had taken her far longer to decide. 

By Scully's estimation, it looked like nothing more than a narrow trampled line snaking out through untold acres of green. The sort of detour that was bound to dry up just as you were led into the middle of nowhere. 

Out to a place where your bones would be kicked up by hunters long after they had been sown by exposure.

Between Mulder and herself they had only brought their pistols, two extra magazines, their packs, her rudimentary medical emergency kit, two 16oz. water bottles, and a packet of sunflower seeds. They were hardly prepared for adventure.

"I don't know Mulder." She had reconciled all this with her thumbs tucked in her pack straps and her hair pulled back. Absolutely rife with all the reasons why they shouldn't go in. "What does the map say?" 

But he, in his usual way, had been quite persuasive.

"That if we keep following the road, it's going to split apart about a mile up and take us completely around where we're trying to get to, which is only going to add to our time and I'm pretty sure that the Pierces were expecting us a while ago. And I don't know about you Scully, but I didn't pack any marshmallows for a campfire."

He had been squinting at her through one eye at the time, with the sun bellying down so close to the chlorophyll, her hair had been too bright to look at. 

"Besides, what's that saying they say about the road less traveled?"

She had wanted to smile at him then, caught off guard, rolling her eyes for cover.

She had done her absolute best to pretend she wasn't the least bit charmed by the way he had stood there covered in plaid with his jeans and his boots and his hair going dark at his temples. His face in a devastating scrunch.

But in the end, she had caved like a grotto. 

"That it had made all the difference?"

Glancing over his shoulder now to scan the dense underbrush behind them, Mulder wishes they could go back and choose the other choice; the one that kept them going down that broad dirt road which slid through miles and miles of wide open glen.

Damnit Robert Frost. What a terrible idea.

Perhaps whatever's been following them will keep hidden, he thinks, as long as they make enough noise. 

"It's alright if you want to admit it Scully," he calls up ahead, putting his hands out to rustle the maple saplings like children's heads as he walks by, loudly shaking their star-like leaves. "You're just the littlest bit intrigued by the idea of a disappearing meteorite." 

He's hoping for a little indignation.

If he's lucky, maybe Scully will get so riled up by the particulars of the case, she won't even notice they're being followed at all. 

Up ahead, Scully's concentrating on where she puts her feet. With such a thin depression to follow, her boots make her feet tilt awkwardly over moss-slicked rocks and she does her best to avoid the treacherous grasp of the fiddleheads. Twisting an ankle out here is something she'd rather avoid. 

"You know what Mulder? I am intrigued," she admits as she watches the ground. "I'm intrigued by what would motivate a person - this Ammi Pierce - to _not only_ want to perpetrate such an elaborate hoax on you, but also what sort of coercion it would take to convince three scientists from a somewhat renowned University to rubber stamp the whole thing with highly improbable findings, only for them to immediately vacate their positions and mysteriously leave town with absolutely no indication of where they're going or why they left." 

He's making quite a racket behind her, so she raises her voice. "Not to mention the fact that the entire purpose of such outrageous claims would then be used to entice one hapless FBI agent and his stalwart partner that they need to come out here in the middle of the week to investigate something that allegedly doesn't even exist anymore. So yes Muder...at the very least, I am intrigued." 

_Hapless_? Really? That's what she thinks of him? 

His own attention is split between the ground, their conversation, and the back of the trail. "Bit early to be calling it a 'hoax', don't you think Scully?" He musters in admonishment. 

"Not given the current lack of evidence Mulder. No. I don't see how it could be anything else." 

Having been designated unofficial leader of the party, Scully had gotten comfortable in the formless wilderness before her and had let her mind wander in kind.

By now, the portent of the roadblock had been reasoned down to nothing more than the logging industry finally gaining a foothold in the area. The sad, yet inevitable reality that it would only now be a matter of time until this entire forest would be slated for clear cut.

She takes his silence to mean he disagrees.

"Well what part of it do you think could be true Mulder? Once you take away the paperwork which is at the very least circumstantial, the only real solid lead we have to go on is that photograph and what good is that when it's clearly been tampered with?"

He's snapping a twig between his hands, pleased that she's finally gotten to the very point that makes this excursion worthwhile. "Got any evidence to back up that theory detective?" 

Mulder knew she would have trouble interpreting the contents of the photo, but for him, its inexplicable color had been the precise reason why he had brought them all the way out here in the first place. 

The very thing that had made it an X-File.

And he was thrilled with the knowledge that he was about to blow her tiny mind.

"Not without access to a lab to find out definitively," she counters, "but as far as I can tell the method of alteration was done while the Polaroid was still developing. And something else I can't figure out is why the photographer would intentionally tamper with the very evidence we're meant to be looking at. I mean, what are they trying to obscure?"

"Sorry Scully, but I'm gonna have to disagree with you there. I don't think they're trying to hide anything." Mulder meets her eyes as she chances a look back. His face both wary and bemused. "In fact, I think we were sent that photograph because that's exactly what the meteorite looked like at the time of the crash and Mr. Pierce wanted us to see it for what it was. 

"You interested to hear my theory on why I believe it is that they _didn't_ tamper with the evidence?"

She recalls the image of that strange and lustrous rock in her head. Its miasmally stark unplaceable hue. Its unnatural aspect of color beyond color. 

Behind her, she hears his footfalls crash closer but keep far enough back so as not to get whipped by limbs as she blunders by. "Yes." Of course. Always.

"Because, I don't know if you know this about me yet Scully, but I'm colorblind. Deuteranomaly. Had it since I was born. I have a hard time distinguishing reds and greens so things just basically look like a yellow wash. But that photograph? I can _see_ it Scully. Every color that that Polaroid has and beyond. Red. Green. And everything in between." 

There. He said it. Now all he had to do was wait.

Scully stops in her tracks and turns around to face him, understandably bewildered in her own outside way.

In truth, when he had first seen it, the tiny thing had hit him like a revelation. Looking at that photograph and for the first time really _seeing_ all the colors everyone else in the world saw and took as a given was staggering. For once in his life he could _see_ what orange really looked like. The clear distinction between purple and gray and green. And unquantifiably more.

He had stared at that picture for hours, holding it in shaking hands with tears streaming down his cheeks. Emotionally and spiritually changed.

"Mulder. That's not possible."

"It is though." He's living proof.

And he knows she knows what he's telling her _is_ possible, because he's just said it and she trusts him. But now he has to wait for such an impossible idea to sift down through all her filters of science. 

"You're telling me the photoreceptors in your eyes, specifically the cones in your retina that are responsible for absorbing specific light waves and translating them into color in your brain, the ones that by your own account are afflicted with a form of anomalous trichromatism ...somehow _work_ when you look at that photo?"

He nods.

"Mulder. That's impossible." She breathes.

"It isn't though Scully." He laughs a bit. 

He's gotten her so good, they're repeating themselves. 

"I mean, don't ask me to explain it," he goes on, "but maybe it doesn't have anything to do with the eyes at all and it's somehow something that transmits directly to the brain. Like a bypass. Or genetic memory. I read once when I was trying to learn more about my colorblindness that magenta technically doesn't even have its own wavelength. That our brains invented it to make sense of the jump between violet and red on the color wheel. Maybe it's something like that."

She's looking at him mesmerized, like she's never heard him speak before. Like he's living proof of an extraterrestrial.

"Or maybe it's something like Cherenkov radiation - also known as 'cosmic ray visual phenomena'. For decades astronauts have reported seeing spontaneous blue lights flashing in outer space even when they closed their eyes. So in the 1950's, a Soviet scientist conducted an experiment and discovered that the electromagnetically charged particles that cause it are flying so fast and with so much energy that it activates light in the optic nerve of a person without them actually having to look at it. Apparently, it's been compared to taking the photon equivalent of a sonic boom straight to the cranium," he says impressively before adding, "it's also supposed to be the same blue light given off by underwater nuclear reactors too."

She's about to ask him to dig out the picture again, wanting to absorb all this new and wild information like the radiation it feels like when suddenly Mulder turns on his heel.

She watches warily as he slides his pack to the ground, noticing that his focus is centered back down the trail at the place where they had come and doesn't get truly worried until she sees him reach for his gun.

Seconds pass by. Nothing moves. 

"Mul-" he stops her with his hand in the air and her senses go on high alert as she tries to understand. There's nothing but still undergrowth around them. The air feels stiflingly hot.

She hikes up her pack as quietly as she can and reaches for her pancake holster.

"Do you hear that?" He whispers after a beat. 

"No."

"Me neither."

And then she catches on. There is nothing to hear because there's _silence_. 

"What happened to the birds?"

Mulder is looking for a rustle, a silhouette, anything to draw his weapon's aim. He can feel the apprehension mounting as he finds only green. His sixth sense making his hairs stand on end. 

Whatever has been following them has finally decided to make its move. 

With a cougar; your best bet at taking them down was with a lung shot. With a black bear; you should go for the nasal cavity. 

With a pukwudgie, you just prayed that they'd give up their game and grant you passage because they could disappear at will. And it was a damn good thing they weren't anywhere near a cliff.

A twig snaps underfoot. Mulder sets his jaw.

"Cover your ears." He warns Scully before firing a warning shot into the air.

Which only makes the silence crystallize. A knife's edge pressing in.

And then, finally, what's been following them steps out onto the trail. Head down. Legs planted. Large black eyes focused squarely on them. 

It's not anything Mulder is ready for and he has only a moment to recognize what it is before it charges. 

"Scully! Get down!" He yells and the world melts into slow motion. 

Mulder watches in both horror and awe as the heinous creature eats up large pieces of ground, tilted hard on spindly legs. Ones that tear through distances far too large for a small monster that size to realistically take. 

It's heading straight for them, closer and closer. One cantering gambol. Two. 

It's on top of them now. 

Just before collision, just before it's too late, the animal braces itself down, coils tight, and rockets up and over their heads. Leaping higher than it should be able to. Containing more muscle than a half-wasted body should hold. 

It easily clears Mulder's six-foot head along with his three-foot reach, overleaps Scully hunkered down and braced defensively behind him. 

Mulder's barrel remains trained on the creature's chest the entire time, but he's too stunned to take a shot.

The world crashes back into real-time speed when the doe's hooves strike the ground and Mulder blinks stupefied for a moment before ripping off after it, leapfrogging over Scully in a full-on sprint after the white warning tail.

"Mulder!" Scully calls after him, still crouched on the ground with her finger on the trigger guard, trying to understand what the hell just happened. Had they just been attacked?

He comes jogging back a few moments later, puffing hard, having lost it in the boscage. 

He looks uncharacteristically shocked.

"What the hell was that Mulder? A deer!" She's brushing off her knees, startled and amazed. "Did you see that jump?" 

After what he had seen, he considers its unnatural agility inconsequential. "Did you see its face!"

Clearly and distinctly, Mulder had seen the way a large part of the deer's skull had been sunken and gray. How its tongue had hung against its chest with no lower jaw to keep it in place and how its upper lip had been pulled away at the gums resulting in what Mulder could only describe as a maniac tooth-bared smile.


	3. Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3  
\--

"We were following a deer trail Mulder," Scully tries for the second time, "it stands to reason we would have a higher probability of coming across one eventually."

"And then only to have it _charge_ at us like that?! C'mon Scully. How many deer attacks have you ever heard of happening to humans? Let alone witnessed?"

"Technically none," she admits, since she had been on the ground and he had been blocking her view most of the time, "but maybe it wasn't trying to attack us at all, maybe it just wanted to get past us because we were in the way."

"To get to what?" He's scanning the trail up ahead for any sign of the tortured creature, but so far has found nothing to even show that it had come this way. No scat. No hoof prints. It was like it disappeared. 

"I don't know. A water source maybe?" 

Speaking of water.

"Not going to do it a lot of good with no lower jaw." He grouses.

Mulder wants very badly to find it hunkered down somewhere. Wants to show Scully the irrefutable proof of its sinister grin.

In an attempt to extend an olive branch, she taps his arm with a water bottle. The lid already conveniently popped. 

"I don't doubt it was in the condition you describe Mulder, I just think that there's a more rational explanation for it than you automatically attributing it to something to do with the meteorite. Maybe its jaw is missing as the result of a hunting accident, or maybe there's a contagion that's been affecting the local deer population and we just don't know about it..."

"What sort of contagion could possibly do _that_ to an animal?" 

He had mentioned the correlation as soon as they had started walking again, throwing it out there like a pebble between them, knowing that the ripple of it would always find her. 

But a colloquialism like 'strange days' shared by the locals was not going to be enough to convince her that a diseased deer was going to fit into that purported scenario too. Coincidence did not mean causality. At least not without irrefutable proof.

"Chronic wasting disease, a combination of rabies and mange, epizootic hemorrhagic disease." She rattles off the scant few illnesses she's aware of that were apt to ravage gentle woodland creatures, making a mental note that when they returned to Washington she would have to brush up.

Undeterred, Mulder tips back his head and drains the whole bottle in a series of long pulls that has Scully tracking a rivulet of water down the delicate machinations of his throat.

But then the bright glint of something in the distance catches her eye and she squints past him to see. 

"Mulder look."

Running parallel to the trail, camouflaged behind wild thicket and the pillared trunks of spindly trees, Scully can suddenly see where the forest stands cleaved against a skyey void and wonders how long they had been traveling along its side without even knowing it.

An open swath of frothy meadow greets them like a discovered secret as they breech the tree line, with its waist-high grasses and blousy flowers that shimmer and ripple in the breeze.

A ways in the distance, pinning down its center like two watchful eyes, are two large buildings surrounded by a gridlock of split-rail pastures; a red saltbox house and a large red barn, both of them looking out over riotous crops and decadent acres.

Behind them, lying mostly obscured, is a large silver pond, whose surface keeps sending out slices of light like a beacon, beckoning them in shiny morse to come.

'Can't miss it' is true.

Ammi Pierce's place looks as friendly as a dreamscape.

Idyllic as a greeting card.

"Home sweet home." Mulder mutters and follows Scully's lead.

\--

"Mr. and Mrs. Pierce! It's Special Agents Mulder and Scully! Hello?! I'm the one you wrote to about the meteorite! We're finally here!" 

By the time they had reached the little farmstead, the sun had sunk low enough to brush the tips of the trees and the whole sky was beginning to bruise towards sunset.

It had been a very short transition for Mulder to go from polite and professional knocking to all-out palm pounding on the door and he had to physically fight with his body not to collapse for just a minute into one of the available rocking chairs. Now that they'd stopped walking, his legs were impossibly tired.

"Anything?" He asks, turning back around.

Off in the distance, carried by the wind, comes the hollow sound of cows.

"Nope. Nobody." Scully is tipped against the fine crosshatch of the galvanized door screen while the front door behind it stands open, tempting them to come in. A clear and flagrant display of country hospitality. 

The quaint little sitting room looks wholesome and cozy with its worn pastel furniture and its antimacassars but overall remains totally empty. 

"Maybe they went out looking for us."

A savory smell drifts out from beyond the kitchen and Scully's stomach cramps in jealousy. Mulder must smell it too because she hears his stomach growl like a swamp monster as he stands glowering beside her.

"I don't think they'd leave dinner on the stove if they were going out on a search party." Mulder says with some conviction, pressing his own face to the door screen beside hers. 

He goes loud again, smacking furtively at the jamb with little regard to her hearing. His big nose squished flat. "MR. AND MRS. PIERCE! IT'S THE FBI!" 

After nobody continues to receive them, he regroups and considers the circumstances. Hand sliding down the screen in impotence. "Maybe something happened to them and they can't get to the door..."

Scully sighs and stands and slides her eyes sideways. "Maybe the deer got 'em." 

It's a tease that gets her an unamused look as Mulder's arm reaches across her to unlatch the door.

"In any case, we should check it out. Just to be sure." He says and they both go inside.

They find no obvious signs of the house or its occupants having been disturbed as they go through, the only evidence that their departure had been recent.

Embers still glister in the bulky black stove in the sitting room, while the table in the dining room is set with four place settings and the cast iron pans in the rustic kitchen at the back of the house burble on low.

It's not until they go out onto the back porch that they finally find their hosts afield and apparently too preoccupied in their tasks to have heard them. 

Immediately splitting up to cover more ground.

Scully keeps her eyes clapped on the blue rump of a woman stooped over in the middle of a large and sprawling vegetable garden whose beds have swollen well past their tidy edges with ripening harvest and green.

Cambered over the garden gate is a cattle panel archway run riot with a chaos of sweet peas and Scully takes a moment to smooth down her clothes and take a deep lungful of the ambrosial air beneath it before finding her center and entering.

"Mrs. Pierce?" She calls ahead.

The woman turns and gives Scully a warm, sideways smile past her knees, still bent double with her arms full of cucumber vines. 

"Well now, we was just about to give you up for lost," she says in greeting and turns back to her burden, talking on. "Had halfa mind ta take the dogs out ta come lookin' for ya after chores, but it looks like ya saved us a trip. Which's good. Ol' Ammi an' me ain't too keen on travelin' through the woods at night anymore."

"Mrs. Pierce." Scully repeats, approaching with her badge extended, even though the woman shows no real concern in confirming her identity. "I'm Special Agent Dana Scully with the FBI."

The woman glances back at her again, grunting as she shifts the substantial weight in her hands. "Musta hit a spot 'o trouble along the way, t'get ta lookin' atchya. Ya look about as ragged as a thunderstorm."

Mrs. Pierce is approximately fifty, wearing a light blue gingham dress with a dark blue sweater overtop and pearls. She's keeping clean in a pair of gloves that match her apron. A red handkerchief covering her hair. 

She's dressed to the nines as far as country folk go and Scully has a rare moment of self-consciousness at the idea that she's somehow unkempt in comparison. Though, to be fair, she had just trekked through miles of wood and been run over by a maligned deer on the trail, so...

"Yes. I apologize for the delay. There was an obstruction in the road and we were forced to walk." 

"An obstruction ya say?"

Next to the woman's black rubber boots sits a bouquet of fresh-cut flowers that burst forth from a watering can. 

Scully pockets her badge. "Yes. Apparently someone found it necessary to cut down some trees in the area."

Mrs. Pierce seems intent on mulling this over, but that's not what Scully wants to focus on. She wants answers.

The sooner they can get to the bottom of this, the sooner they can leave. Or at the very least, she can sit down.

"Mrs. Pierce. Your husband and my partner Special Agent Mulder have been exchanging letters about an unusual meteorite that fell in the area recently and I was hoping I could ask you a few questions concerning the event."

Now that Scully is closer, she can see that the woman's face is hard-boned but soft, like a rock left out in the weather and the subtle sweetness that is tempered into those homey features could only have come from a lifetime's worth of hard country living and simple expectations.

A spider is crawling up Mrs. Pierce's wrist and she leans down a bit to blow it gently back to the ground. 

"Ain't much we can do 'bout all that right now, but seein' as you're here, howboutchyu give me a hand? At first I came out here ta get somethin' nice fer the table, but then I went an' got distracted like I always do. What's the chances the FBI learned you how to tie a reliable knot?"

"Uh, they didn't," Scully answers, caught a bit off guard, "but my father was a captain in the Navy and taught me how to tie a rope. What do you need?" 

In fact, Ahab had instilled in her from a very early age that any piece of rope brought onto a boat was a line that needed to be put to work and Scully had retained the muscle memory to make at least fifteen different kinds. More if she kept her eyes open.

"The devil gets into these vines every time I turn my back, I swear. If you'll just help me with this end..."

She's instructed to reach into Mrs. Pierce's apron pocket and pull out the scissors and twine and then proceeds to help her string up a new lattice for better climbing as the last one had snapped under the weight. 

Once a strong framework is woven and the vines have been set to grow in more acceptable directions, Scully is ready to address the woman in the way she had been intending to from the beginning. "Mrs. Pierce-"

But she cuts Scully off. "Now then, Agent Dana Scully from the FBI, I'm not sure how it goes in the city, but 'round here houseguests are considered as good as family when they're comin' ta help with a problem like we got an' I'll not have you addressin' me all formal like you're goin' door ta door. You call me anythin' else you like under the sun if you have tha mind ta, but don't go callin' me 'Mrs. Pierce' no more. Alta usually does in a pinch, anyhow."

The woman busies herself by twisting off some of the previously hidden cucumbers that have grown large enough to pick and puts them in a basket with some tomatoes Scully hadn't seen among the vines.

"Alta then, I'd like to ask you a few questions regarding-," Scully tries, but doesn't get much farther. 

"Persistent little thing, ain'tchya?" Alta interrupts again, with absolutely no grievance in her tone. "D'ya mind?" She's handing Scully the overflowing watering can and giving her little choice but to take it. 

Tilted on her belly, cradled in her arms, the cloud of mismatched blossoms shift in their cool bath of water and do their best to tickle her chin. Their aroma a heady scent of earth and sunshine.

Alta takes up the food basket. "Now then Mrs. Scully. What d'ya say we head on back ta tha house an' see to supper first hm? I bet you and yer partner are fit to fall over after all that walkin' and I'd hate to be held responsible for the FBI losin' two of their 'special agents' to somethin' as silly as hunger."

As if summoned to existence by her words, Scully's stomach takes that moment to grumble loudly.

Alta chuckles, "sounds ta me like yer 'bout chewin' on your backbone. C'mon." 

She guides them back towards the house which glowers maroon in the twilight.

It's a minor detail really. One that shouldn't bother her like it does and she manages to make it all the way to the gate before Scully just can't hold her tongue anymore.

"It's 'miss'." She corrects, stopping them short beneath the wild scramble of arching flowers. "Ms. Scully. I'm not married."

"Is that right?" Alta seems perplexed by this and Scully all but blushes under the brazen head-to-toe sweep she gives her body. "A looker like you?"

"I'm sorry?" Scully startles.

Alta laughs. "Oh, yer gonna haveta pardon my frankness dear. It's old habit. I just mean that it's hard to believe that someone as beautiful as yerself ain't been married yet is all." Apparently, she finds it nearly impossible because she asks earnestly after a moment. "Not even a proposal?"

"Um. No." Scully squirms uncharacteristically under this sudden scrutiny, pricked by the unintended truth of Alta's words. "Not yet." 

It's so unusual to hear outright appraisal of her features in such a blatant fashion, and given the rare occasion that she actually did, Scully was more used to hearing it come from men.

But to hear it come from this woman whom she's barely known for more than a minute - who is approximately the same age and intensity as her mother - gives her words a sense of gravity that makes them linger long enough for Scully to consider them to hold a hint of truth and tuck them away.

"Savin' yerself, that's smart." Alta says, giving her a little wink. "A looker an' a thinker."

But it's not only that; for all intents and purposes, Scully is married to her work and her time with the X-Files is probably as close to a normal life as she's going to get. Which is fine.

She already gets to spend nearly every day with the love of her life.

What more could she ask for?

There's a brilliant golden thread clinging to every edge around them as the sun finally dissolves beneath the horizon and in the deepening gasp of twilight the farmstead goes naturally still.

"Well then, _Ms_. Scully," Alta says, reaching over Scully's shoulder to snip off a large and frilly sweet pea with her thumbnail, before sliding it into Scully's hair like a hatpin behind her ear, smiling the smile of a secret keeper, "for when the right man comes along."


	4. Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4  
\--

Under Alta's instruction, Scully rings the bell on the back porch to bring in the men and takes her seat at the table with a little objection. "No no. Don't be silly. You be in charge of the flowers, that'll be yer job for tonight." Alta says, handing her over a crystal vase of water.

The men return a little while after and Scully perks up at the sight of Mulder, giving and receiving a smile. He comes in wearing his socks, having left his boots outside the door with the dogs, not wanting to track in mud.

He pulls out the chair next to her's. 

The man she assumes to be Ammi Pierce comes in behind Mulder. He's approximately the same age as Alta with a tanned and ragged face borne of long days in the sun that makes a craggy frame for two pale piercing eyes. The dark cloud of his mustache and beard are just beginning to show patches of white.

Alta is bustling back and forth, setting food on the table in all its various forms and Ammi catches her mid-stride with a yelp, hooking her by the waist to give her a peck on the cheek. 

"Mind yer manners, ol' man." She says affectionately as she swats his arm. "We got company."

"So's I gather'd."

Ammi takes off his hat like a gentleman as he comes to seat himself at the head of the table and in his attempts to comb back his thinning hair with his fingers, Scully sees that the white is beginning to creep in at his temples too.

Mulder introduces them. "Ammi Pierce. This is my partner, Agent Scully."

"Nice to meet ya ma'am. Gotta say, yer partner's somethin' of a help," Ammi's voice is a deep, deep timbre and he shakes Scully's hand in a firm and callused grip. "Once you get'im ta listen that is," he adds.

"That's right Scully," Mulder corroborates, "consider me a bonafide cowpolk."

Scully glances sideways at him, surprised at his taking any sort of direction from anyone.

"Helped me ta put tha cows in the barn for tha night." Ammi goes on to explain. "Did a fine job too."

Scully looks slightly impressed. "Is that so?" A city slicker like Mulder never really struck her as the cowboy type, but the man was full of surprises.

"Darn tootin' little lady." Mulder plays along and shakes out a cloth napkin to drape across his knee and shrugs. "Seemed like a small price to pay in exchange for good accommodations, and besides, if they ever get their way and close down the X-Files, at least I'll have another career to fall back on."

Amused, but undeterred, Scully clears her throat. "Mr. Pierce, I'm sure my partner has already had the chance to speak to you, but I was wondering if-"

Alta comes into the dining room just then carrying a large platter.

"Now hold yer horses, Ms. Scully. Ol' Ammi an' me'll tell you everthin' there is to know about why you had ta come all the way down here, but not 'til after supper's done." She admonishes, swinging a divine specimen of slow roasted ham onto the table. It's the pièce de résistance and it smells absolutely amazing. "Go 'head an' serve yerselves an' then we'll do Grace."

"Better listen to tha missus." Ammi advises under his breath with a wink and they all do.

Ammi is charged with slicing off the steaks while Alta serves up ladles of baked beans and boiled cabbage. The thick slices of anadama bread she passes out are still warm enough to melt the thick clots of home-churned butter for those that choose to lather it on and soon everyone has their plates filled and waiting.

The Pierces and Scully bow their heads while Ammi leads the prayer and Mulder looks politely down at his fork until they can eat.

After supper, their emptied plates are cleared away and Alta is offering them dessert to varying degrees of acceptance.

Scully politely declines anything other than a cup of coffee while Mulder boldly accepts both the coffee and a large slice of Alta's great-great grandmother's apple cheddar galette, clearly having worked up quite the appetite over the course of their day.

It is another little while before they are all sitting still with their fingers curled around antique bone china and their interests at full tilt. Waiting patiently until Alta finally settles down beside her husband with a look of trepidation and tucks her hand securely into his. 

"Alright then. Go ahead." She says. Granting permission. 

And he does.

It all began, old Ammi said, with the 'meteor stone'.

It had been brought with a white noontide cloud and a series of explosions that had shaken the sky, before embedding itself in Nahum Gardner's front yard, right next to his well.

Up until that day, these western woods had been a peaceful place where farmers could work their land, tend to their animals, and raise their families untroubled for generations. There had been no wild legends of hauntings at all since the witch trials of the 1600s.

But that had all changed four months ago.

Nahum had come to town shortly after to tell people about the meteorite and had to do little convincing to bring the professors from Miskatonic. All of them had stopped by Ammi's on the way back to invite the Pierces along to view the specimen with them, as their house had been on the way.

"We been friends with the Gardner's goin' on twenty years now. Known 'em since a'fore they had tha boys. They's always been good n' dependable folk." Ammi says. "Always walked uprightly in the Lord's ways.

"So we all went out there ta see what Nahum was fussin' 'bout, an' that first time we go'd out thar, them pr'fessars took'a chunk offa tha stone an' took it back fer testin'."

"Mr. Pierce," Scully interjects, "were you aware that all three professors you went out there with that day resigned from their positions at Miskatonic University and moved out of Arkham?"

"Did they?" This news is clearly a surprise to Ammi. "Must'a been the third day, 'cause we went back out there twice more, 'til there wasn't no meteor stone left ta go back ta."

Scully asks, "did they happen to disclose where they intended to go when they spoke to you that day, Mr. Pierce?"

"No. Can't say they did ma'am." Ammi says, shaking his head and that seems to be the end of it. 

Ammi continues. "Alta stayed behind tha second time - had ta stay home ta tend ta tha house, ya understand - but when them pr'fessars dug out that second chunk from the meteor stone ta take back, they found sum'it queer. An' none of 'em could explain it's bein' there." He was stroking his beard methodically with his free hand as he spoke.

"What was it?" Mulder shifts forward in his chair, tipped across his decimated plate. He's enraptured in the same way a child would be across a campfire. Leaning into a ghost story. It was a good thing he wasn't wearing a tie or it might have ended up in his coffee.

"There was this _thing_ , like a ball o' sorts." Ammi makes the shape of it as best as he can. Approximating a sphere the size of a softball.

He goes on to describe how the professors had discovered the single strange globule embedded deep within the meteorite, noting that when it was tapped it had the consistency of being both brittle and hollow and that when they had struck it with a hammer in an effort to dislodge it, it had vanished with a nervous little pop, leaving behind only a spherical bowl in its disappearing.

 _Release of spores_? Scully scribbles in the margin and tilts her notepad for Mulder to read.

"Were there any immediate consequences of the globule disappearing?" Mulder asks aloud. "Did you see it emit anything into the air?"

"No." Again, Ammi shakes his head. "Nothin' that I could tell." 

Disheartened but not derailed, Mulder asks. "How about wildlife in the area? Have you noticed anything unusual?" 

He's thinking about behaviorally, like the way animals act strangely before major rainstorms or earthquakes. How they seem to forecast disasters. 

He's thinking about the deer.

And the hairs on his arms stand up when he witnesses the look that Ammi and Alta share.

"The McGregor boys from up on Meadow Hill coupl'a weeks back went out shootin' woochucks, an' story goes they bagged one near Gardner's place. Accordin' ta Stephen Rice, they ain't brought nothin' back 'cept a story 'bout how it looked 'cause they had ta throw the thing away, scared 'em somethin' awful. Said it had an e'spression that no'one'd ever seen in a woodchuck a'fore."

"What did it look like?" Mulder asks, while Scully sips her coffee. Unwilling to jump to conclusions.

Although she is surprised to find herself slightly relieved when she sees Ammi shaking his head again. "Nothin' in partic'lar. Jus' that it ain't look'd right."

And that line of questioning fizzles out.

After a moment of silence, Ammi carries on. "So then we went back out there that third time - tha last time, turns out - 'cause night a'fore that there'd been a thunderstorm an' Nahum'd said that tha meteor stone 'draw'd the lightnin'. 

"Said he seen it hit the hole six times a'for it was gone an' we all got ta thinkin' that that was gonna be tha end of it, 'cept..." Ammi seems to brace himself for this next part and Alta's knuckles are bloodless in the vice of his grip. "When we went out there after...it...it uh..." he hesitates, like his narrative is snagged on a nail.

"Somethin's changed." Alta says cryptically, picking up the thread. "We know how this is gonna sound an' we know what city folk sometimes get to thinkin' 'bout country folk, that we ain't nothin' but simple-minded fools livin' out here in tha sticks. An' Lord knows we _know_ that rocks don't shrink, but hand ta God, tha things that we seen happen ta our friends and tha land 'round Nahum's is somethin' we ain't never gonna be able to explain." She pushes her chin up high in defense. "An' you can believe what we tell ya or don't, but it ain't gonna make a twitch o' difference when facts is facts."

Ammi and Alta are sitting rigidly in their chairs, their faces stern while their eyes swim with emotion. 

A tense moment builds around the table. The Pierces are waiting for ridicule.

But then Mulder leans forward and allays their fears in that gentle way he does with the unbelieved. The way that's been carefully culminated from a career spent trying to translate the experience of the unexplained to the nonbelievers. 

Because he knows exactly what it's like.

"Mr. and Mrs. Pierce, while I understand that you may be reluctant to disclose any sort of bizarre anomalies or events that may have occurred concerning the meteorite; I would just like to assure you right now that Agent Scully and I are simply here to find out the truth. That any information you present to us that you feel could be of importance has the possibility of being key evidence in our solving this investigation."

Scully can physically see the tension leave both of the Pierces' bodies. Her pen hovering just above her notepad. "Please continue." She encourages.

Ammi is newly emboldened. "Mr. Mulder, you 'member that strange pitchure I sentchya? That one that got too many colors in it? The one that ain't look like no color at all?"

Scully's gaze remains professionally calm while Mulder nearly salivates. "Yes."

"It's creepin' inta everythin' now. Everythin' green that's growin' 'round that well is changin'. The grass. The fla'ers. An' them trees." A shiver goes through Ammi as he says this. "They's growin' too big 'round Nahum's property. Unnatural. There's a rumor goin' 'round that they move when there ain't no wind. Might be som'it in the sap. I can't explain it. But ya gotta believe me."

"We believe you Mr. Pierce." Mulder soothes.

"Do you know if the professors performed any sort of tests on the soil after the meteorite disappeared?" Scully asks in the interim, glancing at the crucifix on the wall.

"No ma'am. Once it 'as gone, that's when them pr'fessars stopped comin' 'round. Must'a been the day they dropped off their findin's that they left." Ammi drops his voice until it comes out as a hushed tone. "But I'm tellin' you, whatever it was, wherever it come from an' disappeared to; that meteor stone ain't nothin' o' this earth, that's fer sure. One o' them pr'fessars said so, tol' me it's a piece of tha great outside and therefor bound ta outside laws. Ain't som'it for man ta know or understand. Only God."

Taking advantage of the heavy silence, Scully gently tries to redirect the conversation. Trying to give such a description context. 

"You mentioned that you've known the Gardner family for twenty years, can you give us more information about them? Their names, ages, anything that may be useful..."

It is Alta's turn to speak now and she holds herself together for the most part.

She goes on to describe Nahum as a lean, genial man of about fifty who prides himself on his hard work and accomplishments. Who, until the recent shunning of the road near his house by the neighbors, had been roundly praised for the fertility of his land and orchards.

His wife Nabby, a sweet and quiet woman of about forty, was as dutiful a wife and as consummate a friend as anyone could ever ask for. She was a woman that prided herself on the raising of her boys almost as much as her husband prided his farm.

As for their three sons - with her voice finally quavering at the mention of the boys - Alta describes them as three facsimiles of their father's spitting image. Zenus, a big lad, was seventeen. Thaddeus, a sensitive youth, fifteen. And little Merwin, the youngest, 'just the sunny side of six'. 

"Bless their hearts."

Alta crosses herself with a napkin clutched in her free hand, tears welling in her eyes. "Those poor innocent kids ain't done nothin' to deserve any o' this. Nabby neither. It ain't their fault..."

"But you believe it to be Nahum's?" Mulder asks, picking up on what she's not saying.

Unintentionally stumbling across a sore spot.

"It's Nahum's damn _pride_!" Ammi suddenly growls, slapping his hand down on the table hard enough to make the salt and pepper shakers and his wife jump.

"God done put a curse on 'im!"

"Oh hush Ammi!" Alta whimpers in response, as though this is an old argument that they have worried to the point of pain between them and had not intended for it to come out in front of company.

"Don't go hushin' me woman. It's true!" Ammi leans over the table to get his point across. "He went out ta get them newspapers, an' bring them pr'fessars, braggin' 'bout it all 'round town! An' look what it done to him! It's changin' 'em. Nabby an' the boys!"

A tear rolls down Alta's cheek and she turns away from Ammi as though she can't bear the truth of it. Her hand remaining clutched in his.

"What's happening to them? Is the meteorite affecting them somehow?" Mulder presses. "In your letter you said something about 'strange days' coming to the Gardner place. What did you mean?"

After a few moments of deep breaths and an earnest stare to get his wife to look at him once more, Ammi's shoulders slump back in his chair and he goes on to describe what has been happening to their friends. 

It began back in May, a whole month after the meteorite had fallen, shrunk, and disappeared, when the last frost date was fast approaching and the focus of all the farmers in the woods now turned to the summer crops that were meant to be planted and grown until their subsequent harvest in the fall.

Nahum - on one of Ammi's initial visits - had commented that the work had tired him more than it had in previous years and both men had surmised it to be nothing more than age beginning to tell on him. That was, until the rest of his family had started taking ill. 

They had begun to fail both physically and mentally, becoming taciturn to their friends and neighbors and had stopped going to church more and more until they ceased completely, eventually isolating themselves inside their home and relying on Ammi and Alta to run their errands in town.

As time went on, their odd behavior only grew more strange.

"I once caught all the Gardner's standin' out in tha yard by the well one night - back when I still went there after dark. 'Bout the last time I did, come to think of it." Ammi says. "Caught 'em lookin' off in all different directions, listenin' fer somethin'. 

"When I asked Nahum what it was, he told me he didn't know, only that they 'as listenin' fer somethin' that 'as jus' waitin' ta be heard."

"That's 'bout the time I stopped goin' too," Alta interjects, a litte guiltily, "after Nabby went mad in June, there wasn't a point. I tried, once, fer the boys, you understand." Her eyes swim with tears. "But after the things she was sayin'..." she falters and hides her trembling mouth behind her napkin. Old terrors boiling up her memory. "I couldn't do it. I was too afraid ta go back."

"What sort of things did she say?" Mulder coaxes softly.

Alta sniffs and steels herself. Her voice pulled tight enough to snap. "She told me that things fluttered and changed. That tha walls and tha windows moved. That somethin' was bein' taken away. She was bein' drained. She said that-that somethin' was fastenin' itself on her that ought not to be, that someone must make it keep off. Nothin' was ever still in the night. I-I- I couldn't go back after that. I didn't have the heart."

In an unconscious motion, Alta's thumb is rubbing Ammi's gnarled knuckle.

"Then word came that Nahum'd shut her up in the attic on account'a the faces she was makin' at the boys and by July she'd stopped speakin' and took ta crawlin' on all fours. I don't know what truth there is in that last part, but that's the story I heard from town." 

"Did you ever contact the local authorities?" Scully asks, deeply concerned.

"Miss Scully," Alta's voice is gentle, her napkined hand going out onto the table as if she might hold Scully's hand. Her hard eyes resigned, "the authorities ain't willin' come out here fer somethin' as small potatoes as rumors. Not with the madhouse already bein' full an' everythin' worse they got goin' on in Arkham all the time.

"An' whatchyu come to understand about livin' out here on tha farm is that sometimes some of tha things that need ta be done in the name of mercy, might be judged cruel by the law. We take care of our own out here, best as we can. Which's why we called you out here."

"Where is Mr. Gardner's place in relation to here?" Mulder asks, opening a new line like a stint.

Thankfully, the tense air that had been building up around the conversation finds a release in this and Ammi positions the pepper shaker above the salt to best illustrate their houses. "If you's comin' in from Arkham," he says, marking a spot to the right of the shakers, "the road splits off three ways." 

His three fingers follow his words and separate, marking the three forks as they travel to the left like a trident, plotting their courses. "Ya follow the North road, ya come ta Nahum's," he explains, making a line leading up to the pepper shaker. 

"Take the middle, ya come here." He draws a line to the salt. "An' tha South road goes off through tha country. Spits ya out somewhere near Dedham, I think." He finishes.

"There's a _road_ to your house Mr. Pierce?" Scully asks with a bit of bite to her words.

"Yes ma'am." Ammi answers, his first positive reply in a while. "Had it built a'coupl'a years back ta make gettin' ta town easier. Comes in right a'fore the split."

The side-eye she shoots Mulder - the one which he consummately avoids - is akin to ducking live fire.

"Approximately how long does it take you to get to Mr. Gardner's house from here Mr. Pierce?" Mulder obviates.

"On tha trail we got made through the wood; 'bout forty, forty-five on foot. Horseback takes 'bout twenty."

"And by car?"

Ammi's brows knit. "Ain't got a car."

Cold shock breaks over Mulder and Scully simultaneously at this news. Reliant as they are on modern transportation to accomplish their work, this sudden dearth is alarming. 

Mulder opens his mouth as if to say something, but closes it when nothing comes out.

"There's no need fer one 'round the farm," Alta explains, sympathetic to the Agents' reactions, "an' gettin' to town's easy enough now with the new road, but don't worry yerselves too much over it, we borrowed some horses for you to use when you head out. Got 'em in the stables already. One fer each of ya."

Mulder is the next to speak.

"I think I'd like to visit Mr. Gardener's place." Mulder says with conviction, slugging down the rest of his cold coffee and rising. Pushing in his chair. "Is there anything I need to know about getting a horse ready?"

Other chairs scrape the floor as Ammi and Alta get to their feet in haste, their hands finally coming apart. "Now, hold on a minute Mr. Mulder. It's too dark out there ta be travellin' at night an' 'specially anywhere near Nahum's. There ain't nothin 'bout the last three months that's likely ta have changed overnight." Ammi says with his hand out as though he intends to physically stop him. "I say we all jus' get some sleep fer tha rest o' tonight an' we'll ride out at dawn. I'll come an' wake ya fer breakfast a'fore we go."

Wanting to head off the rebuttal he clearly has at the ready, Scully puts a hand on Mulder's forearm, knowing that if given the chance he would run himself ragged until the case was solved, going without sleep for as long as physically possible until the inevitable crash. Having seen him do it before.

"He's right Mulder," Scully says, drawing his attention her way with a squeeze. "We've been through a lot today and it would be better if we got some rest. We should go there during the day with fresh eyes. Please?"

Mulder takes his time to consider this before finally subsiding. "Alright."

Seeing that their conversation has come to an end and in his favor, Ammi nods. Alta is already busy bringing in Mulder's boots that she's cleaned off. 

"If you'll grab yer bags an' come with me, I'll show ya where yer sleepin'."

They are led outside under a shingled red awning that links the house to a side door on the barn. The pond that sits to the side of the garden is an inky black hole with no moon to reflect, though it is alive with frogs.

A few cows that have not yet gone to sleep raise their heads and flick their long ears as the door comes open and they watch disinterestedly as the group of people make their way across the open dirt ground. The rest of the sleeping bovine are curled in great mounds on the floor, some of them already snoring.

Mulder and Scully are directed up a vertical ladder that leads them to the second story hayloft, where scruffy stacks of towering hay have been pushed to the edge like mountains of gold, making space.

"Alta's already put some blankets up there for ya. Water's in the pitcher an' the outhouse's is over yonder." Ammi says, pointing back outside.

"We can't stay in the house?" Scully asks as she watches Mulder's butt ascend with absolutely no qualm.

"We figured you might prefer it if ya had some privacy." Alta says. The lantern she's holding forward hanging on her thumb ignites her smile. "Walls're thin in the house an' the night'll be warm enough."

Scully takes the proferred lantern, not quite certain how to interpret what she's said.

"Sweet dreams."

"It's not the Ritz," Mulder observes as Scully crests the ladder, his hands on his hips and satisfaction scribbled across his face. "But you gotta admit it's better than some of the places we've stayed." 

And when she sees that Mulder has pulled open the hayloft doors for a view of the night sky, Scully can't help but agree.

\--

"Waddayu fink 'Cully?" He garbles and spits unceremoniously over the edge, losing it in the dark as it falls. He's reminded again at how penetrating the night is away from the sodium creep of the city. Where a light, somewhere, at all times is inevitably left on. He tucks his toothbrush into his cheek so he can enunciate better.

"Do you think God is exacting a curse on the Gardners for something Nahum did?"

Their lantern spews a happy little propane hiss on the floor between the heaps of quilts they have already laid out beside each other as beds while the cows mill quietly beneath them. The aroma in the barn is both sour and sweet, warm with the crush of large mammals.

Mulder keeps his back turned as she gets into her pajamas.

"No." She says simply, sliding out of her bra. She's turned around too, just in case. "But it does go to further perpetuate the stereotype that when simple country folk are faced with inexplicable circumstances, their initial reaction is to find a reason as to why and are readily prepared to bring God in as an arbiter."

"What? You don't believe in divine retribution?"

She's doing up her buttons. "I believe in forgiveness being given to those who ask for it. In benevolence. But I also believe that God has given us free will and that we are ultimately held responsible for the naturally occurring consequences thereof, be them explainable or not with no outside interference being necessary." 

She comes up behind him. "You can turn around now."

Mulder is wearing a gray tee shirt and a pair of dark pajama pants with bare feet. She does her best not to linger too long on the smooth curves of the strong, naked biceps she so rarely gets to see by casting her eyes off in the dark treeline and immediately spots something.

"Mulder. Look at that." 

Off in the distance to the West, the sky above the smoldering silhouette of black trees is gloaming faintly against the night sky as though it holds its own source of hidden illumination on the ground. "What do you think it is?"

"I don't know, but Nahum's place is off that way. Maybe it'll be there tomorrow and we can check it out." He says, rubbing his chin. His body is naturally turned towards her, inviting her in and when he is able to tear his eyes away from the great distance that yaws out before them he immediately finds himself entranced.

She's as shiny as a seraphim in her long-sleeved soft pink pajamas. With bare feet and painted red toes. She's a center-fold with her clothes on. As gauzy as a wet dream. And Mulder's constantly stunned by her ability to grow more beautiful every time he looks at her.

Unable to help it, he reaches out and fingers the hem of her sleeve. Giving himself this one tiny token.

Scully, pulled into his gravity, looks over at him too and catches him looking at her as she hears the symphony of nocturnal creatures swell up from the darkness beneath them. 

Tonight has the odd feeling of them riding on the crest of something big. Standing, as ever, as a united front against an oncoming flood of the unknown. Ready for whatever the dawn will bring.

"I want to say thank you Scully." Mulder says suddenly. Boldly.

Her sleeve is heavy with the weight of her arm. The fabric delicate like the moment. Would it be too much to hold her hand? Probably.

"For what?" 

"For coming out here with me when there's so little evidence to go on." He scuffs the floor with his foot, nudging a stick of hay off the ledge and forgetting to notice how it helicopters down until it disappears from view. "For letting me drag you around in the dark."

"I'm here willingly Mulder." Scully says and gets the overwhelming urge to simply extend her fingers and touch his hand, but that feels too intimate a step, so she keeps them resolutely curled against her palm, ignoring their emptiness. Relying on her words to be enough. " But I'd go with you anywhere if you asked me to."

He smiles at her.

"Scully I-" Mulder licks off the confession that comes too hastily to his lips, not giving it time to take flight and get away from him. "I um-"

"Yeah?" 

Jesus. When did her eyes get big enough to fall into?

"I like your flower." 

He reaches up and gently touches the frilly, feminine thing, all the while kicking himself.

The statement is true technically, it is a nice flower. But it's not anything close to what he really wanted to say.

Unaware of his attrition, but somehow relieved at his words, she smiles demurely. "Thank you." Then her eye is drawn outward, back towards the view and the glassine moment falls away. 

He tries to think of something to say. 

"Don't get me wrong Scully, but are you sure satin and straw are gonna be a good mix?" 

He notices too late that it's not satin, but real silk, and it only heightens his vision of all the plucked threads and punched holes that are bound to happen to that decadent sleepwear in a loft that was swept but not spotless. 

He already knows the disappointed face she's going to make standing over the trash can later when she has to discard such an expensive item borne from the constraints of a government salary and the reason he knows is because he has often made that same face when he ruins another one of his Armani suits out in the field with blood, mud, or hospital visits and it's far better to avoid it right now if she can.

She looks down, rubbing the soft cuffs of her sleeves from inside them. "But I didn't bring anything else to wear." She says somewhat slow.

She had brought three of her four like pairs under the assumption that they would be spending their nights in a cheap motel as they always did and had wanted something nice to shield her skin from the friable bleached sheets.

But she should have been prepared for anything in retrospect.

"You can borrow one of my shirts." 

The offer is out of his mouth before he even realizes its contents and the wild cold that pools in his belly at the sheer intimacy of such a suggestion surprises him. Lovers are the only ones who wear each other's clothes as far as he knew.

He doesn't realize he's holding his breath until she says softly, "alright."

Moving quickly, afraid to snuff out this new moment between them, he pads back to his pack and pulls out the nicest shirt he can find to hand over, proferring it like a gift to a deity in his outstretched hand: his beloved Vikings tee. It's soft and supple and nearly threadbare. The black outline around the curved white horns, braid, and handlebar mustache on the mascot nearly faded away. Worn thin with time and washing. 

She takes it with a blue blink of thanks and he turns his back again, swallowing hard. 

Try as he might - though it's made all the more difficult when he can hear her skin sliding against silk - he can't hold back the image of her pert little naked breasts sliding down inside what is now his absolute favorite shirt and he knows that he'll never be able to wear it out in public again for as long as he lives, because it will forever be a reminder of this moment and this thought. 

An acceptance to his offer. 

That tonight, right here, an intimate line has willingly been crossed between the two of them. That they've signed some sort of pact together. Carved their initials into a tree. That the stakes have been raised and there's a kindleable promise that someday they could become more than best friends. Partners beyond partners and more. But it's just going to take them a little more time.

Mulder sits down at the edge of the hayloft door under the gravity of this new chapter of their lives. Welcoming the cool breeze on his face. Not able to trust his legs to hold him.

Scully joins him after a minute, standing there at his side with her silk top folded and put away, but still wearing her pink pajama bottoms until it's time for bed and it amuses him that the hem of his shirt hangs clear down to her knees. 

Only in front of him would Scully ever even consider the discordance of wearing such mismatched clothes. And he takes comfort in that.

With canted faces and the silence unspooling around them, Mulder and Scully look out upon the night's black pelt together and contemplate all its fathomless stars, using each other as anchors to hold onto while their individual thoughts spill out into voluminous dark. 

The only place large enough to hold them.

It is a blessing to know how to map the constellations and Scully takes certain felicity in her ability to do so. Plotting their careful arrangement as she had learned them as a child, as they arc unchanging across the sky: Ursa Major, the planet of Neptune, Camelopardalis, Coma Berenices, Lacerta, Vulpacula, and Draco.

"It's hard not to feel insignificant compared to it all." She says finally.

And Mulder hums.

"We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, Scully.'" He says like a philosopher. "Which's got to be true, 'cause I read it in a book once."

She laughs softly through her nose and they find somehow that they are leaning together after all. Exuding heat and warmth between them. He against her leg.

He goes contemplative again.

"I also read once that the Japanese have a word - yugen, which is meant to encapsulate the spiritual feeling we get when we look out upon the universe and find that it's too deep and mysterious a sensation to convey in any other way. A definition for that which we can't otherwise define. Seems to fit, I think."

"Yugen." She repeats, testing it out like new candy in her mouth. "Yeah, it fits."

She loves the way he closes his eyes when she cards her fingers through his hair. 

Sounds a bit like you, she thinks but doesn't say.

But her actions will speak in place of her words and trusting her instincts, Scully bends a bit against his heavy weight and transfers the sweet pea into his hair, tucking it above his ear. Content with the knowledge she's made the right choice. 

She's passed on the flower to the right man who came along, just as it had been intended for. Just like her heart.

She sends a prayer out into the ever-blooming cosmos.

And thanks her lucky stars for good measure.


	5. Chapter 5

CHAPTER FIVE  
\--

She's readjusting her blankets, riding the high of a second wind of wakefulness, while he's already tucked deeply into his own makeshift bed with only his shoulders poking out. She plonks down her eyeglass case and a book on top of her pillow which he immediately snatches up.

"And just what do we have here?" He asks playfully, holding up the offending item. " _Fiction_ Scully. Really?" He never would have pegged her for the type. Though it certainly is thick enough to be hers.

"Yes, really," she shrugs, refusing to feel weird about it. "It's Jane Eyre, Mulder. It's a classic." And one of her favorites if she's being perfectly honest. This is her fourth read-through. "What did you bring to read?" 

"Hallucinogens and Shamanism." He says casually, ignoring the face she makes.

"Sounds like a real page-turner." She says flatly for emphasis.

He only grins. "Well, it may not the bodice rippers you choose to while away your nights with Scully, but it keeps my interest just fine." 

Her hair slides over one eye as her head tilts. "Clearly Mulder, you never had to read Jane Eyre in high school." 

He considers the truth of this, the differences that must be inherit between East-coast and West-coast schools, and then surprises her completely. "Read me some then." 

She's stunned. "What. Now?" 

"Sure. Why not?" 

"Do you want me to start over from the beginning?" 

"No. Just read from wherever you are." He punches in the sides of his pillow and settles down on his belly, watching her. 

"But you don't even know what's happening..."

"I think I can figure it out," he encourages her by moving the lantern closer, "c'mon Scully," making it hard to refuse when he pats her bed invitingly beside him. Sleepy eyes only for her.

Quiescent, Scully sits down cross-legged on the top of her blankets, puts on her glasses, and pulls out her bookmark, fingering the soft edges of her paperback as she finds the last place she left off.

Which just so happens to be right at the best part it would seem. She clears her throat:

' _"Then I must go:—you have said it yourself.”_

_“No: you must stay! I swear it—and the oath shall be kept.”_ '

"Oo. You even do voices." Mulder interrupts and she dares to flick her eyes at him, continuing on, if only to prove her courage as Mulder continues to stare right at her.

' _"I tell you I must go!” I retorted, roused to something like passion. “Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton?—a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!—I have as much soul as you,—and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh;—it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal,—as we are!”_

_“As we are!” repeated Mr. Rochester—“so,” he added, enclosing me in his arms. Gathering me to his breast, pressing his lips on my lips: “so, Jane!”_

_“Yes, so, sir,” I rejoined: “and yet not so; for you are a married man—or as good as a married man, and wed to one inferior to you—to one with whom you have no sympathy—whom I do not believe you truly love; for I have seen and heard you sneer at her. I would scorn such a union: therefore I am better than you—let me go!”_

_“Where, Jane? To Ireland?”_

_“Yes—to Ireland. I have spoken my mind, and can go anywhere now.”_

_“Jane, be still; don’t struggle so, like a wild frantic bird that is rending its own plumage in its desperation.”_

_“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.”_

_Another effort set me at liberty, and I stood erect before him._

_“And your will shall decide your destiny,” he said: “I offer you my hand, my heart, and a share of all my possessions.”_

_“You play a farce, which I merely laugh at.”_

_“I ask you to pass through life at my side—to be my second self, and best earthly companion.”_

_“For that fate you have already made your choice, and must abide by it.”_

_“Jane, be still a few moments: you are over-excited: I will be still too.”_

_A waft of wind came sweeping down the laurel-walk, and trembled through the boughs of the chestnut: it wandered away—away—to an indefinite distance—it died. The nightingale’s song was then the only voice of the hour: in listening to it, I again wept. Mr. Rochester sat quiet, looking at me gently and seriously. Some time passed before he spoke; he at last said—_

_“Come to my side, Jane, and let us explain and understand one another.”_

_“I will never again come to your side: I am torn away now, and cannot return.”_

_“But, Jane, I summon you as my wife: it is you only I intend to marry.”_

_I was silent: I thought he mocked me._

_“Come, Jane—come hither.”_

_“Your bride stands between us.”_

_He rose, and with a stride reached me._

_“My bride is here,” he said, again drawing me to him, “because my equal is here, and my likeness. Jane, will you marry me?”_

_Still I did not answer, and still I writhed myself from his grasp: for I was still incredulous._

_“Do you doubt me, Jane?”_

_“Entirely.”_

_“You have no faith in me?”_

_“Not a whit.”_

_“Am I a liar in your eyes?” he asked passionately. “Little sceptic, you shall be convinced--"_ '

A wide yawn suddenly disrupts her reading and Scully has to throw a hand up to cover her mouth.

"Sorry." She apologizes, glancing up at Mulder, but she sees that while his face is still turned towards her he's staring with a sort of glazed look in his eyes. It takes him a moment to realize that she's stopped reading and he blinks back into awareness.

"So...do they get married?" His voice is a low, quiet rumble. As though he's been in a daze.

Scully's eyelids droop the more she fights it. "More or less..."

"Why? What happens?"

Scully shrugs, exhaustion having plumbed clear down to her bones and she slides her bookmark back into place and puts away her glasses, unable to win against the struggle. She brings up her knees and pillows her head on her folded arms, closing her eyes. It takes almost too much effort to talk and keep herself upright at the same time.

"They go to the church to get married...some complications occur...yadda yadda yadda. And they end up marrying by the end of the book."

"What sort of complications?"

"Mulder," she grumbles, "it's late and I'm tired and we have to solve a case tomorrow..." Another yawn overtakes her as if there weren't already enough evidence. 

"Here," she surrenders and holds out the book, "read it if you want."

He takes it and turns over on his back, wriggling his shoulders to get comfortable. "I will, but you can't leave me hanging Scully. At least give me the quick and dirty before you go to bed."

She grins at his genuine interest. "You really want me to spoil the ending for you?" She hears the soft buzz of him rubbing his thumb against the corner of the pages and she closes her eyes against the sound.

"Hit me."

Scully sighs but musters what she can. "Well. It turns out that Mr. Rochester already has a secret wife, Bertha - who is mentally ill and violent so he keeps her locked up in the North Tower."

Scully has the brief flash of the poor Mrs. Gardner in relatively the same situation.

"Jane, who is unwilling to remain at Thornfield at this discovery, runs away and nearly dies wandering out on the moors until she is rescued and when she returns to Thornfield after about a year, she discovers that Bertha, before committing suicide, had started a fire that burns down most of the estate and leaves Mr. Rochester disfigured and blind as a result. They get married after that. The end." 

"Tough break." He says finally, opening the book and taking up the place where she stopped. Lying the bookmark on his sternum. "You want me to read it to you?"

She's not honestly sure what he's said, but her natural instinct is to respond. And somehow, miraculously, she's already inside her blankets. Which is good. "M'hm. 'Night Mulder." Scully mutters before slipping quickly to sleep.

Mulder tilts his head and smiles at her sleeping face. "Goodnight, little skeptic." He says and finds the next line.

' _“What, me!” I ejaculated, beginning in his earnestness—and especially in his incivility—to credit his sincerity: “me who have not a friend in the world but you—if you are my friend: not a shilling but what you have given me?”_

_“You, Jane, I must have you for my own—entirely my own. Will you be mine? Say yes, quickly.”_

_“Mr. Rochester, let me look at your face: turn to the moonlight.”_

_“Why?”_

_“Because I want to read your countenance—turn!”_

_“There! you will find it scarcely more legible than a crumpled, scratched page. Read on: only make haste, for I suffer.”_

_His face was very much agitated and very much flushed, and there were strong workings in the features, and strange gleams in the eyes._

_“Oh, Jane, you torture me!” he exclaimed. “With that searching and yet faithful and generous look, you torture me!”_

_“How can I do that? If you are true, and your offer real, my only feelings to you must be gratitude and devotion—they cannot torture.”_

_“Gratitude!” he ejaculated; and added wildly—“Jane accept me quickly. Say, Edward—give me my name—Edward—I will marry you.”_

_“Are you in earnest? Do you truly love me? Do you sincerely wish me to be your wife?”_

_“I do; and if an oath is necessary to satisfy you, I swear it.”_

_“Then, sir, I will marry you.”_ '

\--

Mulder snaps awake, jack-knifing up, gasping for air. His eyes goggle for familiarity, explanation. Barn. They're in the hayloft of a barn and he's had that nightmare again. That same resilient memory augmented by years of fruitless pursuit and it's so vivid it's gotten to the point now that he's not even sure it's real anymore.

A breeze from the open door floats in across his sweaty skin and he finds that he is trembling.

Breathe. Deep breath. It already happened.

He takes another big inhale and blows out his breath though his nose, counting to ten. Just like he had taught himself all those years ago when the nightmares and subsequent panic attacks had begun shortly after Samantha's disappearance. And what hadn't be solved by specialist visits or experimental medication throughout his subsequent adolescence, was solved all these years later by simple insomnia.

An oldy but a goody.

Pried free from the sticky fingers of the nightmare's grasp he looks over to find Scully still asleep with the blanket pulled up over her nose. Taking what comfort he can glean in her soft snoring as she lays there dead to the world.

Good. He's glad he didn't wake her.

He shakes out his hands, flexing his fists, and lets his head hang between his elbows, focusing his mind on the sounds of the night, on the cows beneath them. A gentle sussurus of straw and flatulance. Until --

He's assaulted by a smell. Something distinct from the cows and the barn and the warm, fragrant night. 

It's him. And it's _bad_.

The combination of excursion sweat from their hike and fear sweat from the nightmare is comingling into a sharp sourness that he may as well take care of while he's up.

Moving on silent feet, he rustles quietly through his bag and grabs a new set of boxer briefs and fresh clothes and slinging his hastily connected boots around his neck as he steps as silently as he can down the ladder. 

Having left the delicate slip of the sweetpea on his pillow in his place.

\-- 

"Can't sleep?" 

Scully's able to find him in the dark like a sixth sense and he instinctively lets his legs fall down lower in the water. He's pretty sure there's not enough light with no moon, but without opening his eyes he can tell that she's brought the lantern.

He does his best to not move. Just float. "Come on in Scully. The water's fine." 

She's not so easily convinced.

"Why are you swimming out here naked in the middle of the night Mulder?"

He cracks open one eye and finds her silhouette against the sky with her arms across her chest and a blanket pulled up around her shoulders. The lantern she's holding lights her from beneath like some great benevolent gargoyle come to hector him. 

"I didn't want to get my clothes wet."

Scully hums and then makes like she's leaving. "Alright, 'night." Apparently only having come to visually confirm that he wasn't drowned.

"What? You're not gonna get in?" He asks, going vertical and paddling in place to face her. He's a bit hurt that she doesn't want to stay, but vindicated when she turns back around.

"No. I'm going to go back to bed. Ammi said he's going to wake us up at dawn, which is -" she checks her watch, "in about three hours. And I'd like to get some sleep if I can."

She says it like she means it, but if Scully really _truly_ meant it, she'd still be walking, not willing to stand on the shore and quarrel with him.

He has a once in a lifetime chance right now and the pursuit of the possibility excites him.

"Ever been skinny dipping Scully?" 

All it takes is her lips compressing to know the answer to that. 

"Not even as a teenager?"

She scuffs gently at the ground next to the folded pile of clothes that's balanced on his boots. "No. I found other more important things to do with my time as a teenager Mulder." She speaks as though Special Agent Dana Katherine Scully M.D. is embarrassed to admit her lack of adolescent shenanigans and is hiding it well.

"Ah. Like getting hot 'n heavy in back seats with the boys, I understand." He teases and sees the way her posture tightens so she won't squirm. 

Not wanting to push her too far, he relents and tilts his head back, pretending like he doesn't care if she stays or goes. Leaving the ball in her court. "Well then, you're missing out."

To illustrate how nice it is, he blows all his air out through his nose and lets his shoulders relax, his arms naturally floating outward with his fingers extended and finds that his peace has only deepened now that she's here being feisty. "It's like...those one things...where you float inside the tube..."

"Sensory deprivation tanks." Because of course she knows the term from his vague description. "Except that those were invented to isolate the person from external stimulation so that experiments could be conducted while under the influence of LSD to study brainwaves in the limited scientific benefit of attempting to find a higher consciousness." 

"Don't knock it 'til you try it Scully." Mulder replies cooly.

A minute of silence resonates for long enough that the chirp of the frogs starts back up and finds a good rhythm until she speaks again.

"What if somebody sees us?" 

He grins to himself. It's a feeble argument at best, which means he's broken through her resolve. He's almost got her convinced now. Just one last hurdle.

"Who's going to see us? Everybody's asleep. Here." He windmills his arms, turning his whole body around as he tries to keep the triumph out of his voice."I promise I won't even look, okay? I'll keep my back turned." It had worked well enough in the hayloft.

Thrill sizzles through him when he finally hears the quick rustle of clothes and the tentative first splash followed by the sudden riptide as she hastily gets in and immediately sinks up to her neck. 

"Woah. Easy."

The water calms as she lays her head back, imitating his posture but facing the opposite direction, her feet still kicking a bit to keep her buoyant. Mulder imagines that with as bold as she's been tonight, Scully's probably still wearing her panties.

Which seems somehow to make this moment all the more remarkable.

"Y'know Mulder, now is the ideal time of the year for bodies of standing water to maintain high enough temperatures to allow pathogenic amoebas like Naegleria fowleri to proliferate to such a degree that if inhaled through the nasal cavity can cause meningoencephalitis; a brain infection that has a ninety-seven percent mortality rate and can kill in less than a week."

"Just try to keep your head tipped back Scully." Mulder suggests with a laugh. "Let your body go loose." 

She's obviously uncomfortable, out of her element and clearly flailing for something familiar to hold onto, which he completely understands. She's out here at night swimming mostly-naked in a stranger's pond with her very naked male partner just an arm's length away on the pretense of nothing more than sharing his t-shirt, but this feels like another leap in the progress of their relationship and he's always had the benefit of long legs.

"The point is to try and relax." He murmurs, trying to put her at ease.

"I am trying." She answers earnestly.

He hears her loud exhale as she tries harder and smiles at her effort.

"Here." Reaching out, he bumps into her fingers and takes hold of her wrist, letting her grab onto his, giving her something familiar to hold onto. "Buddy system."

She relaxes more easily then. Both finding each other's touch to be a valid reason, instead of just an excuse, and they float there for a while.

"Hey Scully?" He prompts quietly.

"Yeah?"

"When you were assigned to the X-Files, what did you think it would be like?" 

She thinks about it a bit before deciding. "I wasn't really sure what to think, Mulder. When I was assigned, the whole thing was like stepping through the looking glass...or at least into the Twilight Zone."

Mulder appreciates the analogies more than he thought he would and doesn't mean to flinch when he asks his next question, but he wants to know. "Do you regret it?" 

"No." She answers and it doesn't come too quickly.

A beat.

"Do you?" She asks in return, nearly under her breath. 

She too asking as though he could.

Mulder looks over at her then, his forehead crushed into a concentrated frown as he tries to figure out how to say that she's the best damn thing that's ever happened to his work, let alone his life, without giving himself away completely .

She looks as devastating as a kelpie as she looks back at him.

"When you first walked into that basement Scully, I have to admit that I was a little bit terrified of what you were put here to do. But what I've come to figure out is that your ruthless pursuit for scientific answers has only proved to strengthen the validity of my work, not sabotage it like they wanted you to.

"There are a lot of people in the FBI who consider what we do a waste of time, I understand that; but what they refuse to understand is that the divide between what is science and what is paranormal is growing smaller every day and I think that our work together is instrumental in helping to close the gap. I even think that one day we may even discover that all along we've been describing the same thing, but just using different languages to explain it."

He swallows, hoping he's making his point.

"What I'm trying to say is that without you, the X-Files would still be a thankless job that I took on in an effort to find out the truth, in whatever form it would come to me as, but with you here, by my side, it feels like an absolution. Like you've substantiated it a thousand times over, more than I ever could have on my own. You give edges to the undefined. You put me through my paces at the same time you have my back and for that I'm grateful.

"And given the number of times you've pulled my bacon out of the fire with your strict rationalism and devotion to a cause that wasn't even yours to begin with, I can't imagine it being any other way. I wouldn't ever want it to be. You're the best partner that could have ever been stuck with me Scully and I look forward to coming to work every single day because you're here now. So no, I don't regret it. Not for a second."

She smiles at him then, perhaps even with wet eyes, and tightens her fingers instead of speaking. Both of them acutely aware of how Scully's got her fingers placed strategically on his artery and they have been tracking the steady pulse of honesty as it courses through him. Like a human lie detector.

Letting herself go completely, trusting him to hold onto her, she lets herself sink back into the warm water and looks up, finding as she always does, the order in the chaos as she finds it mirrored within herself as well.

Mulder loves her, in his own spooky way, no matter if she plays the role of sphynx or harpy to his life's story. And this truth is the ether she floats in.

Their devotion to each other may have begun with work, but it now pulses ever outward through their friendship, their future, and through forever. All it needs to define itself is more time.

And she's willing to wait.

Above them, a dark trickle of bats passes beneath the lustering clutches of a tumbling sky and Mulder and Scully track their progress in their innate terrestrial jealousy. They lay floating like two beings caught outside the slipstream of life, impossibly happy to have come together to watch its flow. To study it and know it and hold hands beneath it.

Forever and ever. Together.

"Scully, did you feel that? I think an amoeba just brushed past my leg."

"Shut up Mulder." She says placidly. "I'm busy finding a higher consciousness."

They are both of them contented.


	6. Chapter 6

\--  
CHAPTER SIX  
\--

They are sitting quietly having breakfast when the front door slams open. So hard that it claps off the wall.

"AMMI!? . . . where are you?!" 

Alta, in the middle of sliding a pair of sunny side ups on top of Mulder's sausage hash, jerks and swings the pan around, knocking over his glass of orange juice which douses Scully's bowl of hand-picked fruit and her freshly salted hardboiled egg.

"Christ almighty Nahum! What's going on?" Alta stammers as the man comes blustering into the room.

Nahum is tall and whipcord thin - twenty pounds lighter than his photograph now - with skin that's wrapped tight around hard coils of muscle and the small parts that are exposed from the cuffs of his dirty long johns and suspendered pants is tinged gray.

His elongated face is sunken and lined, with a light mop of disheveled hair. There's a week's worth of unshaved whiskers bristling his chin and deep bruises of sleeplessness slung heavy beneath his eyes. 

His features come perpetually knotted into a snarl; bearing the visage of a man who's been pushed to his absolute edge.

"Where's he Alta . . . where's Ammi?" His words grease together into an intense mumble. Like a drunk with no alcohol left.

The same lever action rifle he had been cradling in his arms in the photograph is freshly-blued and still attached to his hand, the barrel tilted down towards the floor. It's the only item in his possession that looks well cared for.

Scully has her arm bent, tipped behind her back, while Mulder is getting to his feet, trying to make himself the largest person in the room as he edges towards their host.

Nahum does not notice them.

"Where's he damnit . . . I need 'im!"

"Hey, relax." Mulder puts a hand out to try and calm the man, but his words are lost in Alta's answer.

"He's in tha small barn. Why Nahum? What's wrong?" Alta rushes to Nahum then, concern overcoming any fright she might have had of his thunderous demeanor, clutching at his suspenders. "Did somethin' happen to Nabby? The boys?"

At these words Nahum shakes her off with a growl, spinning on his heel to go back out the front door and they all follow Nahum back to where the horse barn stands on the far side of the garden, lagging behind Nahum's tromping step.

They find Ammi bent beneath the overhang, with the second horse's leg bent between his knees, midway through his work on getting it ready for their ride. The first horse is already saddled and tied to the fence outside, waiting patiently, while the third is still housed in the barn.

"Nahum? We was jus' fixin' ta come-" 

Ammi straightens from checking the horse's shoe at the sight of his friend and is just barely able to catch hold of the second horse's rein as Nahum gets up in his face. Startling them both.

"The horses Ammi . . . damn beasts've bolted!" Nahum's eyes are wide and wild. "They's spooked by sum'it . . . run'd off when I open'd the doors . . . last night they's kickin' their stalls . . . makin' a racket . . . I need ta find 'em Ammi . . . I ain't gonna lose 'em too!"

He is clutching at Ammi with his free hand. Desperate to the point of madness.

The bridled horse is snapping her head down behind them, trying to break free.

Ammi puts his hand on Nahum's wrist, nodding. Wanting him to let go. "Alright, Nahum. We'll come. We'll help ya search fer 'em."

He glances at Mulder and Scully who are coming up behind them, finally drawing Nahum's attention away and Scully sees that as Nahum considers them with a narrowed eye over his shoulder, he had first thought of them as figments in Alta's kitchen, but has now come to realize that they are real.

And he does not like them at all.

"Who're they?" Nahum grinds out between the clamp of his yellow teeth. His fist instantly grips more tightly, effectively cinching Ammi's collar to the point of choking.

Ammi's words remain calm despite their slight wheeze. "They come ta help, Nahum." He pushes more insistently on Nahum's wrist, feeling himself almost being _lifted_ off the ground. 

He wills Nahum to let him go. Surprised at his strength for such a skinny man.

"Agents Mulder and Scully." Mulder supplies, coming up behind the two men, but careful to give Nahum his space. He has that same placating hand still held in front of him, with the other hanging read at his side. Showing no fear. "We're with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. If you'll just calm down and tell us how we can-"

A cascade of emotions pour through Nahum's face then; shock, revelation, and finally the curdled unpleasant blame of betrayal. He turns back against his friend.

"Ye brung 'em . . ." It's a statement, not a question. His voice a graveled scrape of words. ". . . brung 'em here . . . fer what?"

"Ta help ya Nahum. What's been goin' on with yer farm-"

"Ain't nothin' been goin' on with my farm!" Nahum gives Ammi an off-balance shake, making his feet scrabble against the ground.

Ammi takes an unstable stand while the horse hinnies behind him. "Damn yer pride Nahum ya dumb bastard! Ya know there is! Ya told me so. Ever since that meteor stone. Somethin' bad's befallin' you an-"

"Ain't nothin' goin' on that I ain't got a handle on!" Nahum's face is mere inches away. Spit foaming at the sides of his lips and spattering onto Ammi's chin. The grayness in his face _moves_ beneath his skin, shifting against his features.

Ammi blanches, eyes swimming with sudden uncertainty, having worked his friend up into a terrible froth, he's unsure now how to pull him back from the brink. He tries again.

"Then what 'bout Nabby? What 'bout yer boys? What's happenin' to 'em...they need help Nahum. Help ya ain't able ta give 'em. Let 'em help."

A thick gasping inhale of air has Nahum swaying on his feet as though Ammi had struck him across the face. Striking him with the truth of his words and it makes him hesitate. Stunningly becalmed.

But only for a moment. 

Nahum snaps straight, lifting Ammi clear off his feet by his throat. His ferocity is doubled.

"LIAR!" 

Nahum throws Ammi from himself, causing him to stumble backwards into the horse, who rears up on its hind legs. Ammi still keeping hold.

"Ye brung 'em ta take 'way what's mine . . . all's I got!" 

His words are blistering with rage and he swings the barrel of his rifle down in one fluid motion now that his hands are free. Centering it on Ammi's chest. Point blank. Pressed against his sternum.

"No Nahum!" Ammi cries as his hands go wide in innocence.

Alta lets out a startled scream from her position behind Scully's back.

Scully whips her pistol out. "PUT IT DOWN!"

Mulder's glock too is trained on the man. 

The horses all stamp and whicker hideously around them, fighting their various constraints. The mare in the stable is smashing at the wall with powerful back legs. Beginning to splinter the thick boards with repeated blows.

"They ain't gonna take 'em Ammi . . . what's mine is mine! . . . tha horses . . . find 'em myself . . . ain't need ye no more . . . Christ Almighty . . . I call ye _friend_ and ye BETRAY ME?!"

Nahum tightens his dirty finger on the trigger.

A shot rings out in the limber stretch of gossamer dawn.

And a new gorey hole punches through Nahum's shoulder. Mulder's bullet is able to knock his torso askew and slides the butt of his rifle off his breast, the barrel away from Ammi, making Nahum's intended shot go sizzling off into the open country air. 

Something sinister manifests across Nahum's face at this transgression. A transmogrification that is as inexplicable as it is terrifying. The gray in his face suddenly flees the rest of his features, leaving them deathly pale while it consolidates around his eyes to turn his sockets into a soulless dark gray, nearly black in their concentration. 

At the same time this is happening, the corners of his lips ripple back impossibly to his ears, his cheeks becoming nothing more than the stark-edged chasm of a raw red mouth that grins obscenely wide and exposes crooked rows of tobaccoed teeth. 

Mulder has the sudden, undeniable flash of the deer. Of its sinister grin. And is amazed.

An otherworldly tongue spews forth from that gaping maw and those that are present all around are frozen in place. With awe. With fear. Unable to move.

" _ ** **YMG' AH AH'GOTHA SOGH L' YA S'UHN-NGH ATHG LI'HEE ORR'E SYHA'H****_!" Nahum booms and spits a cluster of his own teeth upon the ground at Ammi's feet like a demoniac offering.

It happens as quickly as it is over and those left standing there are in such shock that they're not even sure it truly happened.

Nahum is gone, striding away. The piebald horse on the fence shrieks and yanks at its tie, kicking back with powerful hind legs but missing him as he barges by.

"Nahum!" Ammi calls, but Mulder is quick and grabs him by the shoulder, scouring the treeline that Nahum had disappeared into, back towards his own house. Finding no form to follow. Not wanting Ammi to face such evil alone.

A crashing sound floats back towards them as their only evidence of his leaving as Nahum stalks off through the brush.

Ammi shakes himself free. "I've gotta go after 'im!"

"We'll go together." Mulder insists. "We'll catch up with him."

Scully is already in motion, taking Alta to the side. "I need you to get to town Alta, as fast as you can. Bring the police. Bring paramedics. Can you do that?"

The woman's stricken face is pale, eyes swimming with tears, but she hears what Scully is saying, nodding emphatically. "Yes. But I'll be faster with a horse." She says almost regretfully.

"Take Hero." Ammi says, nodding his head towards the piebald standing at the fence.

"I'll ride with Mulder. Go." Scully makes sure Alta's up in the saddle and headed for the road before she turns back to the men. 

"How much experience do you have with horses Mulder?" Scully asks as she heaves one of the waiting saddles off the fence, seeing him standing there at a bit of a loss, suspecting that she's had a little bit more experience than he has, even if it was back when she was a kid.

"Uh, none." Mulder says honestly. Eyeing the large, snorting brown animal that stares back at him from behind the bars of the stable's window. 

Which means she'll have to drive.

"Tell us how to help Ammi." She says with a nod and they get busy saddling up the remaining horses as fast as they can.

\--

"He shouldn't still be mobile Mulder." Scully comments, not having to talk very loud. "Getting hit with a nine-millimeter point-blank in the shoulder should have been enough to take him down, or at least slow him up." Her mind is spinning through all the possibilities of why it hadn't. She'd heard of perps on PCP taking six slugs to the chest and keep coming. Perhaps he was on some sort of drug. Perhaps it was simple adrenalin. 

Mulder is large and tall. A heavy weight pressed up close behind her. The back rise of the saddle is making his hips slide forward against her backside, while his strong, heavy arms are buckled around her waist as they ride. They sway together as one solid unit as the horse clips along.

"You saw Nahum's face back there Scully. That's the exact same face that deer had!" He's practically vibrating with excitement behind her. Totally in his element. Chasing a suspect, getting closer to the truth, his body crushed against Scully. 

It is with practiced denial that neither of them are willing to acknowledge what may or may not be his erection currently smashed against her gun.

"There's definitely something going on."

Ammi is up ahead of them, leading them over the unsteady ground. They scrum through the unkempt maze of trunks and boulders, ducking their heads against eye-level limbs. Ammi pierces through the thicket with the sureness of a countryman. Someone who knows these woods like the back of his hand. 

They are traveling completely blind except to follow the distant snapping of demolished limbs as Nahum crashes through them. The only sure sign that they are going in the right direction.

"We should have at least overtaken him by now." Scully says, concerned as the sound never seems to get closer. 

Given the long strides of the horses, even with their delayed start, they should have easily come upon Nahum by now. But it appears that Nahum is traveling faster than he should be able to travel on foot, especially given his current condition. And it undoubtedly has something to do with the deer.

She remembers it's unnaturally fast stride. How it was able to eat up great distances of ground. 

She begins to wonder if Mulder may be right; that there is something affecting the local population and it may have to do with the meteorite.

"We're getting close Scully. I can feel it. Do you?" Mulder asks and she acknowledges that there is _something_ in the air. A feeling she can't quite put her finger on. A foreboding that awaits them in the very close distance.

"We're comin' up on Nahum's," Ammi informs them as he stops his horse at the edge of a clearing to wait. "Best ta tighten up on them reins. Animal's tend ta go spooky 'round here."

Scully does as instructed, pulling them taut, feeling Mulder's arms slide up and tighten around her ribs in kind. He keeps one hand unhelpfully pressed wide against her belly against her core. Pressing her back into him and the flicker of heat that lights up between her legs is something she fastidiously has to ignore. 

With his head now craned over her shoulder and his heavy breathing in her ear his, "are you ready Scully?" is a foregone conclusion.

In front of them, fifteen-foot apple trees are lined up in rows, each of them clutching like gray witch hands at the morning sky. Their gnarled branches blister with apples so swollen in size that they appear even from a distance to be the size of oranges. The apples grow clustered up like grapes on a vine. Like frogspawn on a reed. Threatening to pull strong branches down to the ground from their combined weight alone. All of their rounded surfaces gleaming with unwonted gloss. 

They are as phenomenal as they are beautiful.

Giving a nod of his head at their readiness, Ammi leads the way.

They ride slowly through the lines, horse hooves brushing through long grass and Mulder and Scully are perplexed and fascinated by the otherwordly sight of such fruit in profusion. The apples are as undeniably tempting as their forebear from the garden of Eden and turn out to be just as treacherous when Mulder can't help but reach out and pluck at one as they pass by, loosening his grip on Scully.

A rifle shot rings out, followed by the aborted scream of a horse in the distance.

Ammi masterly sets his heels into his horse in the direction of the sound, sprinting off, while Scully leans forward when her own horse rears up and feels Mulder's grip come loose and slide away.

"Mulder!" 

He hits the ground with a hard noise and a groan of surprise. Landing smack on his ass.

Scully wrangles the horse back under control, leaning down against its neck to keep it steady, looking down on him. A perspective she's unused to. "Are you hurt?"

"Just my pride." He wheezes and clambers to his feet, brushing himself off. 

Amazingly, the apple is still gripped in his hand and he holds it up with a justified smile to show Scully the evidence as he steps back up into the stirrup. His victory is cut short, however, when the triumphant bite he takes of it is immediately regretted.

"ACK! Yuck!" He spits at the ground, wiping frantically at his mouth, throwing the fiendish apple there too. His face is twisted into a terrible grimace, aware now of the stealthy bitterness and sickishness that had crept into all the apples. 

For all of that gorgeous array of specious lusciousness, not one single jot was fit to eat.

Another shot rings out and another horse is cut down.

Mulder holds onto Scully tightly as they both lean into the wind, their horse canted forth at full speed.

Another shot cracks through the orchard, louder, closer, and they come upon the men struggling against one another screaming like fiends. They are fighting over the rifle, trying to pry it from each other's hands.

Three horses lie dead around them. Blood pouring black into the grass.

"Damnit Nahum! Gimme tha gun!"

" . . . look at 'em Ammi! . . . sum'it's snapped their brains . . . t'ain't no use no more!"

The fourth horse is feeble and trying to rise, but its legs keep buckling beneath it. Its head sways like a counterweight on its long strong neck that keeps swinging in the opposite direction and tilting it off balance. It goes down once more like a cut sack of muscles with a pathetic cry.

Something very obviously wrong.

Mulder slides to the ground, helping Scully down as they both go for their guns.

"Nahum Gardner! Let go of the rifle!" Mulder bellows, edging around while the other men continue their grappling and remain completely oblivious to him.

The two men pull at the rifle from opposite sides, trying to wrest it from the other man's grip in a fight only meant for two. Their feet scavenge for footing in the tall grass, terrible yelling erupting between them that hardly even forms words. Ammi has his back to the horse, trying in vain to save it.

But Nahum gets another preternatural burst of strength and uses it to sweep the rifle around, catching Ammi by surprise in the collarbones and knocking him to the ground. He brings the barrel down in one motion and dispatches the last of his remaining horse right in the brain. Euthanizing it with the sureness of an expert.

What must be done.

The animal falls at the same time Nahum crumples to his knees, his very life seeming to leave him too.

There is an entire shift to the feeling in the air. One like electricity leaving.

The rifle slides into the grass as Nahum's hands let go. His spirit broken. 

The mayhem instantly subsiding.

Scully is hovering over Ammi, about to ask him if he's okay, when he sits up abruptly and goes to his friend despite her calls against it, sinking to his knees before him. Knowing in his bones that his friend is himself again. "Nahum?"

"They's gone Ammi . . . " Nahum mutters, his voice broken. " . . . all of 'em 'r gone . . ."

It is clear from his sadness that he is not talking about the horses.

"Where'd they go Nahum?" Ammi asks, cautiously putting a hand to his friend's good shoulder as he watches Nahum stare down at his empty, open hands. The seep of dark red blood continues to disgorge itself down his chest, but the stricken man does not seem to feel it.

Scully crouches closely, moving in slow, fingering cautiously at the rifle barrel between them in increments until she's able to pull it wholly away, handing it back to Mulder, but staying there to hear. 

Neither men notice its absence.

Nahum is taking ragged breaths, clearly exhausted. Mumbling to himself. " . . . can't git away . . . draws ye . . . ye know summ'at's comin', but 'tain't no use . . . took Zenas . . . took my boys . . . " Nahum says, hiccuping.

"What took 'em?"

"The color . . . " Nahum answers in a shakey voice, one that prolonged terror has long since ground into burnished fact, " . . . it burns . . . cold an' wet . . . but it burns . . . it lived in the well . . . I seen it . . . a kind 'o smoke . . . the well shone at night . . . suckin' the life outta everythin' . . . in that stone . . . it must a' come in that stone . . . pizened the whol place . . . dun't know what it wants . . . that round thing them men from the college dug outen the stone . . . they smashed it . . . it was the same color . . . seeds . . . _seeds_ . . . they growed . . . must a' got strong on Zenas . . . he was a big boy, full o' life . . . it beats down yer mind an' then gits ye . . . burns ye up . . . in the well water . . . evil water . . ."

"Nahum?" Scully cuts in, keeping her voice low and even, "where is Zenas? Where's your son?"

A rivulet of drool drips from Nahum's downturned face, a byproduct of his hung head and missing teeth with no attempt to stop it. Signifying that the stoutest cord had broken at last, and the hapless farmer's mind was proof against more sorrow. 

"The well . . . " he breathes and answers, doing nothing else, " . . . he lives in the well . . . "

Scully glances back at Mulder with wide eyes and he gives her one nod and clenches his jaw. Knowing what her plan is.

"Ammi." She says quietly, daring to shuffle closer, putting a hand to Ammi's shoulder, making them into a chain. 

Her touch seems to rouse the man from his piteous focus and he gasps like a man coming out of a nightmare, blinking at her with sorrowful eyes. Looking from the face of death to the face of life. "Nahum needs medical attention. I can give that to him, but not out here. Where's his house?"

A shaky hand rises and points in the direction they must go beyond the orchard trees. "Down there."

Scully nods. "I need you to ride back and find your wife. Tell her to bring everyone to Nahum's. We'll search the property and try to find the boys."

It is Ammi's turn to nod and he clambers reluctantly to his feet, swaying for a moment before steadying himself, heading back towards his horse which has taken refuge with Mulder and Scully's a few yards away. They had been standing together away from their fallen ilk, watching the people curiously from a safe distance. 

"Help me get him up onto the horse," Scully instructs at the still-kneeling form of Nahum while she checks his pulse and Mulder goes to get it.

\--

"Oh my god Scully. Can you see that?"

He had first noticed it when he was pulling Nahum down out of Scully's grip on the horse, how the trees around Nahum's were just as Ammi had described them; too thick and engorged to be of any healthy New England wood. And how their color did not look quite right.

The uncolor had been much fainter out there where this prismatic sickness had yet to spread.

Here, so close to Nahum's, it was concentrated tenfold. Contaminating everything.

The house, with its low gambrel roof, and the surrounding land were awash in that same strange miasmal coloring. That unplaceable hue of color beyond color. Coming in frequencies of light that went well beyond the known tints of Earth or anything that could be seen with human eyes. Saturating anything physical.

The sight of its intensity, upon setting foot on the property, struck him just as soundly as it had when he had looked upon the Polaroid.

It was uncanny. It was ethereal. It was fantastic and unsettling and _everywhere_. Steeped into everything.

"Scully! Your hair!" He had crowed a moment before, watching as she practically _glowed_ like foxfire in front of him. "It's red!"

"It's always been red Mulder." She had grumbled mulishly, blowing a lock of it out of her face, momentarily shifting her burden while she shifted Nahum's legs up from where they had slipped down against her thighs. The downhill slope making it difficult.

"Yeah, but I've never seen it like this before. It's amazing!"

And even amidst the treachery of such heinous uncertainty, walking straight into what, by all appearances, was the epicenter of some infernal madness, Mulder's constant candid wonder at the inexplicable still had the profound effect of making her smile.

They are carrying Nahum bodily on foot; their horse having refused to step any closer than the fieldstone wall that made up the property's perimeter. They were moving slowly, sweating down the lane with Scully at Nahum's knees and Mulder hefting the bulk of his torso, doing his best to mitigate further damage to Nahum's shoulder while he felt the hot spread of blood as it seeped into his clothes.

Scully's eyes are set steadfastly on her feet upon the ground, trying to acclimatize her mind.

It certainly had something to do with the meteorite, that she could no longer deny. But as far as what, she could not say. The messenger from the stars could have brought any number of things with it; a foreign mineral, radioactivity, a galactic herbacide, poison, blight, a sickening trick of the eye. 

Perhaps it was a new type of bioweapon, brought down upon a single innocent homestead...but for what purpose? And why?

But speculation of questions she could not have answers to right this second were a waste of her time, she suddenly reasoned. What she could do was see to Nahum. To his wound and his sanity. Try and get him stabilized until the paramedics could arrive.

After what seemed like an eternity, they finally came to the well in Nahum's front yard with its long, old wellseep. Their eyes immediately drawn to the deep, concave gouge that ripped through the earth by its side. Its cause having long since disappeared.

"Scully look." Glancing back, Mulder threw his chin at the top the well where a vaporous light licked upwards towards the sky. Shining bright enough to glow in the daytime. 

They picked up their pace momentarily, skirting wide, in an unsettled silence.

The front door had been left open and they get Nahum in as far as the kitchen, which is more than far enough. Letting their burden go gladly.

They lay him out on the empty table, the bump against something solid rousing him suddenly from his silent stupor. His head rolls to the side, eyes half open as if looking for something. " . . . Ammi . . . where . . . ?"

"You're home Nahum." Mulder bends over him, sliding a red-checked tablecloth up to his chest to cover the poor man while Scully jockeys about searching for makeshift supplies. 

". . . my boys . . ."

"We'll find them."

Nahum shakes his head and mumbles something indistinguishable.

"He's lost a lot of blood." Scully says matter-of-factly, assembling her found tools beside Nahum's head. They consist of a pair of scissors, a wad of clean linen, and a bottle of homemade moonshine.

Scully gets to work, assessing and cleaning the wound. As she's binding up his shoulder, a sharp tug at the cloth making him jolt lucid again.

"Whar's Nabby, Ammi? . . . my head's no good . . . dun't know how long senct I fed her . . . it'll git her ef we aint keeful . . . jest a color . . . her face is gettin' to hev that color sometimes towards night . . . an' it burns an' sucks . . . it come from some place what things ain't as they is here . . . one o' them professors said so . . . he was right . . . look out, Ammi, it'll do suthin' more . . . sucks the life out . . ." then Nahum passes out completely.

"I'm going to go search the house." Mulder says, only leaving when Scully gives him a nod.

"Mrs. Gardner? My name's Mulder, I'm from the FBI. If you can hear me, make a noise. I'm here to help you.

"Zenus?" 

He calls their names in increments, stepping slowly through the darkened house, squinting his eyes and trying all the doorknobs, scoping black corners as best as he can with no flashlight.

"Thaddeus?" 

It feels colder in here than the outside temperature of the day and Mulder knows for a fact that a place such as this would not have air conditioning. 

"Merwyn?"

The cause is something else.

Scully comes to meet him at the top of the darkened staircase, just as he's gotten into position to kick in one of the locked doors he's found in the attic. Having left his lockpick set back in his duffel.

"Here." She puts a hand on his shoulder, jangling a set of keys she'd found on a hook at the bottom of the stairs and sighs disappointedly. "Nahum's dead." Despite everything.

Mulder gives her a look of compassion and turns back to the locked door, only to hear a sliding, shifting sound from behind them. Coming from a room across the hall.

The hair stands up on the backs of their necks, their matched eyes growing wide before Scully wordlessly turns away to investigate after Mulder hands her the keys.

"Mrs. Gardner? My name is Agent Scully, I'm from the FBI. I'm here to help you." Scully pauses a moment with her hand on the doorknob, the key in the lock, her mind flashing on what Alta had said about the mental state of the madwoman. The unhelpful flash of Bertha from Jane Eyre. "Don't be alarmed. I'm coming in."

She opens the door to a darkened room, keeping her back against it. Ribbons of light bleed in through a window on the far wall that's been boarded up against escape, doing lit to light up the room. She gets her gun out just in case.

"Mrs. Gardner?" She shuffles in slowly, eyes flicking everywhere to anything. "Nabby? Are you in here?" The room in completely empty except for one thing; a black bundle on the floor in the corner. Almost imitating the shape of a human. Almost. 

She freezes when she hears Mulder's voice from across the hall.

"Scully? I think I found something."

"What is it?" She never takes her eyes off the form.

"I can't be sure." Mulder calls. He's down on his haunches, having to lift his hand against his face in an effort to block the stench against what he's found. "But I think it's Thaddeus."

"What's his condition?" 

Mulder winces, his teeth set against that which is beyond his comprehension. A mound of what used to be a human is heaped into a crumbling gray pile beneath a set of clothes. "Nothing good." At the touch of his cautious pen to the ashes they shift, and the entire loose column of what could have possibly been an arm crumbles and slides to the floor.

Scully sees it even though it's almost imperceptible in the dark. The form before her _shifting_.

A cold chill goes down her spine. "Mulder?"

"Yeah?"

"I think I found Mrs. Gardner." Scully steps closer, fingers thrumming on her grip in anticipation, bitten by the sharpest sliver of fear as she thinks she hears a breath in the room that does not come from her own lungs. But this masticated form before her does not seem as though there is enough of it left to still be alive. It's a disintegrating blasphemy. 

Continuing to move as it falls apart.

"What's her condition?"

Scully doesn't answer, getting down low, but keeping on her feet for escape. She takes a deep breath to steady herself before reaching slowly forward towards what she assumes to be a neck amidst all the vague shapes. Relieved that she cannot find the eyes.

She comes in contact with the cool, soft skin and sees that it is gray and used as she is to touching gore and misfortune, of being elbow-deep in cadavers and slime, the feeling of her hand pressing into a body that _should_ be solid strikes a primal chord in the bowels of Scully's terror and she involuntarily screams.

While up from the front yard, comes a scream in response.


	7. Chapter 7

\--  
CHAPTER SEVEN  
\--

The answering scream does not break for breath.

And suddenly Mulder is there in the room with her, his silhouette against the window. Looking out between the boards.

"Mulder! What is that?!" She wants to cover her ears against it but refrains for the horror that's on her hands.

"It's Merwyn." He breathes in absolute shock.

The little boy is standing on the lawn near the well, his small face canted up at the house with his little mouth open, his toe-head hair shining in abominated light. 

"Get him." Scully says, but Mulder's already headed out the door. He pounds down the stairs, launching himself entirely over the last landing and catching himself hard against the kitchen table. Nahum's body lurches at the sudden hit and his arm slides out from beneath the red checked tablecloth. His blunted fingertips gray.

Mulder bursts out of the house at full speed, he's down the steps and halfway out to the little boy before he stops himself in his tracks, realizing that a full-grown man running full-bore at anyone is enough to scare anybody. Let alone a child.

"Merwyn?"

The boy had not stopped screaming. 

It's a high, shrill, terrible noise that has an undercurrent of something else entirely beneath it now that Mulder's right in front of it. It holds some sinister secondary sound that no prepubescent boy's vocal cords should be able to render. Deep and resonant. Evil in its intonation.

He drops to one knee against his better judgment and puts his gun away. Having to raise his voice to be heard. "Merwyn, I know you're scared. My name is Fox. I'm here to help you!"

The volume of the boy's scream only rises, hurting his ears.

In another part of his brain Mulder notices the crumbling of the grass. How it collapses in an unseemly way like fire-ravaged skeletons beneath his fingertips. He edges closer to the boy and the well, noting that the iridescent blight has rotted the yard from the inside out as it has rotted all the people that lived here.

Mulder winces as the pitch being blasted in his face grows even higher, his feet creeping him closer despite the actual pain now. 

The boy's face is exactly the same as his father's, except in miniature form. His little visage one of death white save for his dark gray sockets.

Every lizard instinct in Mulder's brain and body tells him to get away, but he inches closer nonetheless. He has to try to save this boy.

"Merwyn. Give me your hand!" He can't help it, he ducks his head against his shoulder, anything to try and help against the onslaught of that noise.

"Merwyn!" He stretches out his fingers, slipping against the little hand that won't reach out to take his. "Give me your hand!"

And just as he gets a firm grip around those little fingers the boy stops screaming. It is a dead stop. An unnatural stop and the tiny hairs on Mulder's arms stand straight up against its emptiness. 

He swears that he can see his own reflection looking back at himself in the boy's saucer-sized eyes and sees another figure come out behind him in the doorway.

It is Scully. 

Mulder breathes a sigh of relief.

The figure hunches animalistic and low.

It is not Scully.

The figure rushes him. Clearing the steps. Feet rending the grass. One step. Two. Mulder does not even have a chance to turn before Nahum is upon them, snatching up the boy and taking Mulder right along with them with preternatural strength and speed.

Mulder cries out in surprise as his head smashes against the coppice, as he is drug over the edge into the well, racking his shins on the stones. The wellsweep with its dangling bucket clatters out of the way. All three of them headed straight for the liquid darkness. Headed for death.

And Mulder experiences a moment of freefall, before suddenly snagging on something hard and his right leg explodes with fire. His shoulder strains in its socket as he takes the full snap of the two other bodies being halted as well. 

His head swims clamorously. He stomach giving a sickening flip. 

Ten feet down inside the column of the well are two boards pinned across it at an angle, acting as a shelf. His foot is caught here, letting him dangle while the pendulum of extraneous weight tears at his arm.

He tries his damndest to not to let go. But his grip is slipping.

And then his eyes meet Nahum's.

Nahum is peering up at him, lit from beneath with his feet slopping in the kaleidoscopic water and that image chills Mulder to his very core.

The uncolored light glows up from beneath the black water from an unknown source. Irradiating them with such manifestation that Mulder can see straight through Nahum's body like an x-ray, straight through little Merwyn's skeleton like some black chain of connected bones, and can see right through his own hand where he holds onto them.

Merwyn's hand slips loose some more as Nahum begins to climb.

Clawing his way up his son.

Eyes hellbent on Mulder. 

The undead man is speaking in that same Eldritch tongue he had spat with his teeth in Ammi's face. The bloody stretch of his lips pulled back again, revealing empty places. He speaks in a language not known to this world. In a tongue that's been borne out of darkness. And it only grows more diabolic as he rises.

Mulder's consciousness is waning. His vision pulses darkly with pain while his instincts flashback brightly like a flintlock against it. Demanding him to stay awake. To defend himself against the oncoming threat. 

Nahum is at the top now. Closing in. Reaching up.

With a terrified gasp, the little boy's hand is pulled away and with a foul cry both father and boy go toppling into the cold, wet lighted darkness beneath.

He has no time to reconcile.

"Mulder!"

Scully is above him now, looking down the well.

"Scully!" He groans, trying to look past his toes at her. The merciless gravity of his blood is making his head feel tight.

"Nahum's body is missing Mulder. Where's Merwyn?" She can't see past his obstruction, doesn't know where to look.

"He's gone. They're both gone." He whimpers.

In a rallying effort he clenches his abdomen and tries to rise, grunting to bend himself up towards his feet, but he's unable to get very far and when he falls back down it wrenches a cry from his throat as he swings into the stony side. His entire body burns. "My leg's caught Scully. I can't get up."

With the addition of the two spoiled bodies to feed it, the light that had at first been merely glowing out of the well now _pours_ out of the well. Flowing upwards like a stream. Strong enough to lift Scully's hair like a heatwave. Make it dance around her head like licking flames. 

He doesn't like it at all. And can feel that it's going to get worse.

"Scully. Get me out of here!"

She prioritizes her options. "Grab the bucket!" And makes sure he has a hold before she races to the other end of the wellsweep, throwing knitted hands over the end of the beam as she tries with all her might to make the pendulum lift him, letting out a cry to boost her energy, trying in vain to climb on top of it. 

But he's too heavy. 

She doesn't have enough mass or strength to move him.

She leaps back to the rim when there's nothing else she can do, pressing her face into the flow of uncolored light to peer down at his upside-down body, her eyes watering against the stream which is still growing in its potency, blowing her hair back towards the sky now. Pressing against her cheeks like a strong wind.

Mulder's clothes are flapping up against him, volplaning up his body as he looks at her one last time. Endcapping all the memories he has of her face.

He already misses her terribly.

She can tell he's losing consciousness as his body begins to go lax. As his arms hang free. 

No longer able to fight the fight.

"Mulder. Try to stay awake. I'm coming down there. I'm coming to get yo--" She begins to say, throwing one leg over the edge with the intent to jump down where she sees his foot pinned until all of a sudden she's thrown backwards by a great large WHUMPH as the heavy rush of the uncolor lets out a pulsating throb and makes towards the sky.

Scully lands sprawled on her back, staring up at boiling clouds that are eating the uncolor like gluttons. Like something foul sucking at the world, plumbing the depths of whatever thing it was that skulked at the bottom of the well and trying to coax it back into the heavens.

The wind it creates is so monstrous now that it pulls the bends out of the branches around her, until every shivering tree stands straight up. Candleabra limbs convulsing towards the sky.

Inconceivably, the blasted uncolor intensifies, burning her eyes like chemical fumes and he throws her arms up to protect them, only to realize that she can see straight through her skin to the sky beyond. Past the insides of herself where the opaque black bones of her elbows hitch together and she can't help but marvel at what she is witnessing.

A furious howl screams out from the depths before there is another loud discharge and the glut of light finds its tail as it rockets back towards the sky, lifting Mulder with it. It whips him helplessly about in the unnatural swirl, carrying him like an abductee in violent ascension until fifteen feet up, whatever astral pull has a hold on him tosses him free.

The earth regains him indifferently as he crashes boneless to the ground. 

And he's able to hold onto his senses just long enough to watch the protracted light stab its way up through the clouds before it disappears forever. Before Scully eclipses his world.

Just like she does already.

"MULDER!"

There is the sudden galvanic feeling of an impending lightning strike in the air and Scully has just enough time to cage herself over the top of his head and wrap her arms around her own before the explosion occurs.

Absolutely awesome in its savagery.

The house behind them gives one single shriek as it is flattened to the dust. Shattering, buckling boards go flying sideways. Thick beams slamming to the ground.

Their ribcages are compressed together, the closest they have ever been is when the light leaves Earth behind.

Scully takes a wash of woodwork across her back and rear and thighs, her pained cry lost in the onslaught against the heavy groans of the surrounding trees as they too are pushed towards the ground but resist. Some of the smaller ones, not having grown strong enough, let out nightmarish screams as their trunks are flayed open under the pressure. Green wood split wide. Exposing their inner flesh like cadavers.

And just like that it is over.

The ensuing silence pierced only by the high-pitched whine of tinnitus.

Scully's pretty sure she has burst an eardrum as she tips an eye towards the sky and catches the slow-motion flutter of the red-checked tablecloth flicker down and land undamaged at her side.

Then her attention is only for Mulder.

He's gasping with his mouth wide open and his head tipped back, trying like hell to take in more than the shallow breaths that refuse to make it in past his teeth. His throat is moving spastically while he kicks one leg feebly against the ground. Starving for air. 

The thick gray dust beneath his heel does not deign to stir.

"Mulder! Mulder." She takes his head between her hands, trying to find his eyes, impulsively shoving away any of the splintered boards that had dared to fall too close to his precious head. "Look at me."

Finally, his goggling eyes find hers and hold. His flailing hands knocking into her chest and belly until he can take up fistfuls of her shirt and lock his fingers in. Mouth still gaping. 

Tears cut tracks through the grime.

"Breathe in Mulder. You have a diaphragmatic spasm, but it's only temporary. I need you to take a deep breath in." The fall knocked the air out of him, she knows, and the medical terminology of the damn thing helps her to focus. Once she gets him breathing again it'll be better. "Don't fight it. I know it hurts but you have to do it for me. Breathe. In."

She wipes at his dirty face with her dirty thumbs, only managing to smear more of the thick gray dust across his sweaty features. Painting his cheekbones and forehead in black. "You can do it."

And soon he does, every breath a hair deeper than the last, catching on hiccups, until he's finally able to take in a whole lungful.

And he uses it to yell.

"Ack! God! Scully!" He attempts to go into the fetal position, wanting to curl up on his side, but Scully flattens her whole body down on him, not allowing him to move. 

"No Mulder! Don't!" With the height that he had fallen from, he could have sustained any number of injuries. "I need to check you over. Try not to move."

Mulder whimpers when she disappears, his view replaced by a blank white sky that arcs traitorously above him, now devoid of even the clouds and the stark emptiness makes his eyes water.

Or maybe it's the pain.

"Scully?" He doesn't like that he can't see her.

"It's okay Mulder. I'm right here." She says, even though her voice sounds very far away. She's down around his belly, palpating his torso. He still hasn't let go of her shirt. "I need you to tell me what hurts."

"Everything h _URTS_!" His groan ratchets up into a snarl when she presses firmly on his chest, finding a broken rib or two beneath her necessary fingers. "Son of a bitch..." he pants through the pain. Thumping his head on the ground.

"What else? Be specific."

It honestly feels like someone has dipped his entire skeleton in acid or lit it like long sticks of kindling, pretty sure that as they speak it's wicking itself away inside of him, burning up and turning to dust, but he tries his best to pinpoint the worst of it. For Scully, he is capable of anything. 

"My leg...god Scully it hurts." He grits out and the throbbing worsens when he names it.

Scully doesn't respond.

And continues not to respond.

For so long, in fact, that Mulder begins to worry. Apparently she knows why. "What? What is it?"

She does not answer.

"Scully? Wha-" He goes to pick his head up, to see what she can see, but his neck feels very stiff and it won't bend right and the glance he manages to catch of her face tells him that she sees something terrible. He moans in fear. "How bad is it? Did it fall off?" He squeezes his eyes shut.

Just about.

Must've happened in the well.

Scully breathes out around the shock of seeing it; the unnatural lay of his right foot.

It's bad.

She rallies herself for Mulder. "You need to keep taking deep breaths for me Mulder, as deep as you can. Ten count in and let it go." She tucks her hair back out of her face, massaging his wrists with her thumbs to try and get him to let go. She wants to give him something to focus on, but she also needs to be able to move. "Good. Do it again." Watching his chest.

Once unfettered, she's down by his foot and whipping his laces clear out of his boot, peeling the tongue back as wide as she can before finally hesitating, trapped at the point where she needs to jimmy his foot free. 

"Scully...?"

She has to make sure nothing important is pinched inside the wreckage of his broken leg.

"Mulder. I need you to listen to me. I need to take your boot off okay? It's going to hurt for a minute. But I need to get to your foot." 

Mulder is beginning to feel nauseous as his mind unhelpfully relays all the different sorts of reasons Scully might be keeping the specifics of his injury to herself and why she's so worried about his foot when it's his leg that's hurting while his foot just feels angrily numb. But maybe it's a good thing. It might be worse if he knew.

"You're going to have to bear with me. Okay Mulder? Get ready...I'm going to count to three. Take a deep breath in and hold it."

It's in testament to her iron-clad focus, that it's not until the boot is off and his scream has subsided that her hands begin to shake. 

"You did great Mulder." She soothes while checking the pulse in his foot, relieved to find it fast and strong through his sock. With her other hand she's gathering boards, sorting through whatever is near that's long enough and flat on the ends. "Stay with me. You're doing good." She's shredding the tablecloth into strips.

The one they had draped across Nahum all those long years ago.

"Help's coming." But when would it get here?

She ties the strips around the boards and splints up his leg with a medical precision that hurts as much as it helps and Mulder puts an arm over his face in an effort to distance himself from the pain while agony thunders through him. Panting like a werewolf.

Scully takes pity on him, stroking his hair, and tries to figure out what to do next. How to get help. She has no way of moving him.

Then she hears it. 

The faint seeping underwater sound of sirens as they grow louder and louder, wombling in through the ringing in her ears and an incomprehensible weight lifts off her shoulders as she sees the paramedics and the Arkham Police pour forth from their luminous vehicles.

Alta has accomplished her task.

They are no longer alone.

"OVER HERE! I have an officer down!" She waves her arms above her head despite the hot pain coursing through her back. Determined to make herself seen.

Soon the paramedics are upon them, replete with a silver litter with which to bundle Mulder away. 

A clutch of officers, momentarily shocked at the sight of the trees, goes about surveying the ruins that was once Nahum's house. Picking carefully through the devastation. Where nothing but the well and a chimney now stand against a dark soft landscape of sticks.

"He's sustained a moderate long fall. Tib fib fracture. Difficulty breathing and broken ribs. He's an FBI Agent. " She relays what she knows, giving them his height and weight, his heart rate and blood type as they flick a penlight over Mulder's eyes and she has to reassure them about his strange uneven eye dilation. 

Scully stays crouched beside him, keeping out of the way. Two fingers pressed dutifully against his radial pulse as the paramedics check over her splint with approval. Another of them laying out the long straps of lashing, getting ready to take him away.

"Don't worry sir, we're going to get you out of here." Someone says, but Mulder's not paying them any attention. He has something else on his mind, knowing his time here is limited.

"Scully?" 

He tries to find her in the crowd of looming faces, but it's hard to stay buoyed through the flotsam of pain, made all the harder when they cant his head back and lock his throat into a neck brace.

"Scully." He tries again.

"I'm right here Mulder." She's suddenly there, leaning over him and her hair is no longer molten gold. The uncolor has left and taken everything. His world is back to a wash of yellow. 

Back to how it should be.

"Don't worry. I'm going to come with you in the ambulance."

"No." He thinks he can feel her hand on his shoulder. Squeezing.

Blood seeps from a cut on her cheekbone and she moons down at him with a look of surprise.

"No? Why not?"

"You have to stay-" 

"What?" He's probably mumbling.

"The well."

There's too much going on above him and everybody moving around and barking information is making him dizzy. He feels like hell.

Three. Two. One.

Those diligent, faceless hands keep his head and shoulders straight as they roll him onto his side just far enough to slide the backboard underneath him. Someone is supporting his leg and it's just enough to keep him from passing out as he's lowered into the metal basket. Though it does nothing against the new spring of sweat. 

"Make them drain it Scully. We need to know-!" He grits out.

"Mulder?"

He catches her hand in a last-ditch effort before they can get to it, clamping onto her wrist and squeezing as hard as he can. Which isn't much. "Scully. Please." He's _begging_ her.

He grimaces, grinding his teeth.

"Mr. Mulder sir." The paramedic is interrupting them, gently but firmly coaxing him to release his grip. "Sir. You need to put your arm down. We'd like to give you something for the pain."

Helping them out, Scully pries Mulder's fingers free and presses them back down beside him so they can strap him down like a monster but he wants to make sure she's heard him. But then he's being pierced with a needle on a bag and the subsequent burn of the painkillers that flood his system takes off the top of his skull and soon there's nothing there anymore to keep his brain from floating away. 

His vision becomes narrow and blurry. His body going slack.

"What hospital are you taking him to?" She asks as soon as she sees him settle.

"St. Mary's." Comes the reply.

"Mulder. I'll meet you there, okay?" She says. Putting a hand on his heart.

"Sc'lllay...?" He slurs out from under the oxygen mask. Eyes slipping closed.

"It's going to be okay."

She had heard his request. She won't let him down.

"It's okay. I'll stay."

She touches his dirty face one last time before he is taken away.

\--

Alta finds her sometime later, slipping in through all the mess, having been brought on the back of Hero with Ammi to the outskirts of ground zero. 

Scully's standing at the edge of the well with a paramedic's blanket around her shoulders and a local numbing her stitches. She stands in a bit of a daze, watching bucket after bucket being lifted from murky depths and splashed upon the ground. 

Police officers mill around them, some of them stopping to watch.

"Oh my stars and garters! Ms. Scully!" Alta swoops down upon her, wrapping her up in a claustrophobic hug that's infinitely worth the pain it causes in her shoulders and back. All the wounds she can't see. 

"Every time I lay eyes on you young lady," she sputters into Scully's ear, "you look like you been pulled through a knothole backwards."

"I'm alright." Scully smiles, comforted. "It's just a few scrapes."

"And Mr. Mulder? Where is he?" Alta's hands are fluttering around helplessly until they finally come together in front of her face, clearly wanting to touch Scully but not willing to touch the butterfly bandages and all the glittering knicks and cuts. She clearly has the desperate motherly urge to soothe them away.

"He's on his way to the hospital, but he'll be alright." She says firmly and believes it now that this is over.

Another splash from the bucket hits the ground and the fetid smell is beginning to ripen the air. 

Ammi approaches with a face like a withered peach, nodding wordlessly at Scully as he puts a hand around Alta's shoulder, clearly overwhelmed by the state of Nahum's house. 

Very different from when he had last seen it.

Emptying the well takes surprisingly little time as the water is phenomenally low. Its contents growing thicker and more fetid the deeper they draw until those gathered around can do nothing but hold their noses against the stench.

Then a bucket rises filled with thick dark sludge and the white bulge of a human skull.

A shout about the discovery goes around and suddenly the crowd grows bigger and presses in closer as more bones and more scum are brought up.

There is a scattering of smaller animal bones, as well as five larger skeletons. There's a small deer and a large dog, and when Scully manages to piece together the three humans that have been dredged up from the depths, she's relatively sure that they are Nahum, Thaddeus, and Merwyn.

Alta lets out a wail at Scully's predictions and becomes enfolded in her husband's embrace, tucking herself like a frightened bird beneath his trembling beard.

Scully is momentarily absorbed by the state of the skeletons, especially with how little Merwyn's body, only having been down in the well for a short period of time, had already been completely skeletonized.

"I want a sample of this sent back to Quantico for analysis." She informs the officer who is maneuvering a dollop of sludge into a baggie marked 'EVIDENCE'. "And get a sample of this dust as well." They nod and take them away.

Another officer is sent down into the well to stand on the pump boards. He's given a long pole and the help of every available flashlight, only to come up with strange news. "It's like there's no bottom!" He calls up to the circle of faces. "It's the damndest thing." He keeps sinking the wooden shaft in as deeply as it will go and never meets any solid obstruction.

Scully circles to meet him as he's being pulled up again, giving him enough room but needing answers. "Was there anything else unusual about it?" She asks. "Did anything down there appear different to you?"

"Different how?" The officer answers, slightly confused as he hands off the pole. Ultimately, he shakes his head. "No. It was just dark. Looked like what any well bottom looks like I suppose."

"There was nothing unusual about the colors down there?"

"Colors?" The officer's face is now thoroughly confused. "Was I _supposed_ to see something?"

"No." Scully recedes, understanding with guilt. "No. Thank you."

In essence, there was nothing left. The uncolor was completely gone.

Once again, there would be no message for Mulder from the stars.

\--

The Pierces come visit on the day they plan to discharge Mulder into Scully's care, bringing with them a vase of home-picked flowers and Alta's great-great-grandmother's apple cheddar galette wrapped up ready-to-bake with instructions for them to take home.

"It'll remind you of us. Of better times."

Mulder manages to stay awake for the longest stint he has so far as they say their final farewells.

"We're gonna be forever in yer debt." Ammi says with a shaky voice, hat in his hands, clutched to his chest. And Scully finds it quite moving that a man who has clearly not cried since the day of his birth is now willing to have tears in his eyes.

With one final tight squeeze from them both, the Pierces are gone.

\---  
EPILOGUE  
\---

"I don't believe this!" 

Scully's in her bathroom shaking out the next dose of Mulder's pain pills when she hears his upheaval.

"They're flooding it Scully!" He explains when she walks in.

She'd made a quick trip to his apartment earlier that day while he had been taking a nap, staying just long enough to get him his daily paper, a set of clean clothes, change the water in his fish tank, and collect his mail. Noticing immediately that he'd received a letter from Ammi.

"They're going to turn Nahum's property into a reservoir! They're burying the evidence. After we were so close! Damnit!" He covers his face with one hand in his impotency, papers facedown against his chest. His left arm remains essentially useless, needing to be used to keep the extra pillow tucked against his broken ribs.

In any other circumstance, the image of him reclining there would have him looking like a spoiled courtesan, if it weren't for the fact that in the middle of every pillow she owned that was currently propping him up and holding him together, he lay essentially broken.

Sighing, but not surprised, she extends the glass of water from the bedside table and gently taps his shoulder. Knowing something like this would be inevitable.

They had only just gotten back home.

"Here. It's already been four hours." She wheedles.

They'd spent the last week and a half trapped in Massachusetts, with Mulder having to have had surgery to pin his leg back together and then having to remain until the hospital felt confident enough that he could be released into her care, let alone to go over state lines.

During his recovery, after learning that he would be in a hard cast and crutches for the next month or so, they had reached an agreement that he would stay at her place when they first got back to D.C., seeing as how she had the larger and more negotiable floor plan.

She had only half dreaded the car ride it was going to take to get them there, but the idea of being home again was enough to eclipse her worry and with him drugged up and sleeping for most of the way they had made surprisingly good time.

Scully involuntarily hisses as she sits down beside him and her noise momentarily snaps him out of his wallowing. His hand coming down.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing Mulder. I'm fine." She says, watching him swallow his pills.

He hands the empty glass back. "Can I see?" 

He's been periodically asking and she's becoming more convinced over time that the hangdog expression he's been assuming when he asks has been carefully crafted into a weapon, which she really only pretends to mind. 

After all, it's giving him something to do.

Moving slowly, she turns around and lets Mulder lift the bottom of her shirt, feeling the weight of his heavy gaze at the same time she watches it in the bureau mirror. 

He's wincing at the aftermath like he does every time and it feels oddly soothing when his large, warm starfish hand takes its place just beneath her bra strap, filling up her entire back with his fingers splayed. Emanating heat like a balm. Like he can heal her with his touch.

It had been a miracle that she'd only needed fourteen stitches for one cut that had sliced deep across her shoulder blade. The rest of her purple tiger stripes were left to mend under cold-compresses, extra-strength Tylenol, and time. Which by now were beginning to turn green.

"How's it look?" She asks, pleased when his hand stays right where it is, even when her shirt slips back down. She finds his eyes in the mirror. Pinning them like butterflies.

"Like it hurts." He replies with remorse. 

She glances at his cast propped up on a stack of pillows. 'HERE LIE THE BROKEN BONES OF MULDER' it reads in black felt tip. "You're one to talk." She says.

He had asked for her 'handcock' a couple of days ago in part jest, but it had made her think of Hitchcock, and in the end they had both decided that it fit there perfectly. 

Scully stares at his long white toes jutting out of long white plaster and tries to reconcile. Feeling his thumb move.

Though she'd taken the brunt of the house exploding; it seemed insignificant compared to what he had suffered. Especially when she knew for a fact that Mulder would now have the ability to predict rainstorms for decades to come. A barometer forever forged in broken bones. 

"It's not so bad." He shrugs and sighs and lays his head back on the pillows, flinching as he settles, looking up at her ceiling. "My doctor keeps me doped up pretty well. I can hardly feel it most of the time." He gives a little smirk to show he's serious.

"Do you need me to get you anything before I start dinner?" She asks, half hoping he'll ask for her to move the television in here to distract him. But she's not so lucky.

"No." He lets his hand slide off her as she rises, not really ready to stop touching her, but the disconnection changes the course of his mind. "Yes. Phone book."

She gets it and comes back, this time facing him with one leg pulled up and silently besotted at the way he attempts to move over to give her more room on the bed. As if he could. Resulting in the inevitable grunt that comes when he tries to move his torso.

"Who are you going to call?" She asks, biting her lip against flapping pages. Their turning only growing more fitful as he can't seem to decide on which letter to choose to begin his search. His lips pursing in irritation.

"Whoever I can to try and get that reservoir canceled. You wouldn't happen to have any eco-terrorists handy on your speed-dial would you Scully? Make it easy for me?" Little trips of individual pages flash by before big pulpy chunks of yellow start flopping back and forth in futility.

His vexation banking in low.

"Mulder." 

There's a resignation steeped deeply in the way she says his name and her hand coming down in the middle of the book stops him short. Her hand on his hand.

He looks up at her, already knowing what she's going to say. "Well, what are we supposed to do Scully? Let it happen again? Let them bury the evidence like they always do? We get so close and then get left with nothing. No proof."

She tightens her hold. "Proof of what Mulder? There's nothing out there anymore. Whatever that _thing_ was in the meteorite, it went back up into the sky and took everything with it. I watched it happen. Don't you remember?"

He did and didn't at the same time. Mostly he remembered staring down the eye of a long dark well into the milky blackness that wanted to take him too, then the boy's hand slipping out of his fingers, his small strange face disappearing under the water, followed by the rushing light that had lifted him into the air and finally lying flat on his back with Scully over the top of him like some terrific angel from Ezekiel. The halo of her hair whipping around her face in a raucous copper flurry.

"What do you mean there's nothing there?" He asks just this side of petulant. "There's soil samples that can still be taken. Sludge samples. Water samples. Someone can test the vegetation that's still around the perimeter...surely YOU as a scientist can-"

But Scully's shaking her head, not wanting him to get himself worked up.

"The well's been sealed Mulder, it was declared a falling hazard. And as for the samples, they faxed over the test results today while you were sleeping. The sludge is a mixture of algae, diatoms, and organic debris."

"And the dust?" He asks hopefully.

But it's met with a sort of sadness in her eyes. "Besides its unusual weight that nobody can currently explain, it was found to be inert. Whatever organism had been inhabiting the area is gone now Mulder. All it left in its wake was alkaline phosphates and carbonates. Essentially potash."

"So that's it Scully. We're just giving up?" He's full-on pouting now. Though he knows that ultimately she's right, as much as he doesn't want her to be. "It's like we didn't even do anything. Like we went there for nothing." He squeezes his temples, covering his eyes again, trying to head off the impending headache he can feel coming on.

Their hands, as ever, remain entirely empty of the Truth they so tirelessly pursue.

"We're not giving up."

He hears her say it, but he's too busy feeling lousy and he avoids looking at her as she stands with a wince and feigns that he can't see her when she leans over him. His plans of detachment are foiled, however, when she sinks a hand into his hair, which just makes him feel more wretched. A useless, pitiable fool.

"We're simply ... able to pursue other lines of inquiry now. We'll keep looking Mulder." She tries. "The truth IS out there."

"We're giving up." He mumbles moodily, clenching his jaw, raging at her ceiling fan. Looking almost like he wants to cry. 

Everything they'd experienced would be gone soon. Another truth subsumed.

Another tale to their names that no one would believe.

And she understands his turmoil.

He is a man in constant battle against a universe that won't give up her secrets. His tooth and nail campaign against a reality that tips forever between what is and _what if_ and she knows from her own limited experience that this one-man fight is exhausting. 

There has to be another way.

She looks at him now, stretched out and wrecked across the neat folds of her bedding. Looking at a man whose whole existence is the better part of a catastrophe. 

And she feels it.

The way the crush of love has planted itself deep within her guts. How the limbs of it are currently squeezing her heart so tightly that it makes her gather up all the vestiges she has of she-never-ever-does-this-and-this-never-ever-happens-to-her impulsivity and she kisses him straight on the mouth.

Surprising them both.

Mulder splutters underneath her with his hand spasming wide and she, like the professional she is - like the partner she's been for years now - rides out his upheaval until it passes.

In the resulting standoff, neither of them move. Even though their noses bump together. Even though their eyes are too close to actually see. The hot slip of each other's breath against each other's lips is enough to keep them melted together.

Mulder is absolutely, positively dumbstruck and Scully only freezes on a cold day, so it's only when his hand comes back to land feather-soft upon the back of her head in acceptance and his grooved lips open up beneath her own in hesitant invitation that she has the presence of mind to finally move and kiss him more deeply.

Their kisses are so gentle here in this first baby step they take together and the tender touch of alien lips that they are already so familiar with are filling them both up with understanding.

How silly they were to assume that they didn't love each other to pieces. 

He can't help it when he moans a little and only dares to break away once his evaporated lungs toe the line this side of bursting and it feels so damn right to consecrate her name like that. Like he can't believe it against all her evidence. Like some clueless unbeliever.

Mulder's breath is so hot against her chin and she can taste her own name in her mouth and it's all so full of love and it's all so full of _him_ and it's all so, so, so, so divine and right and good and just in the world that she wants as much as he is willing to give her. Which she knows is _everything_.

"Scully?" Mulder whispers against those lips that have been vexing him from that very first day, that he's absolutely over the moon to call his own now, "have I told you lately how much I like your scientific method?" 

Scully huffs and giggles and smiles around the purl of his words. Kissing him again.

"Convince me again then skeptic." She whispers back.

And Mulder and Scully and Scully and Mulder slide headlong into the rest of their lives.

\--

THE END.

...or is it?  
*soft X-Files theme*


End file.
